Ace books by Simon Hawke

PSYCHODROME

The Time Wars Series

THE IVANHOE GAMBIT

THE TIMEKEEPER CONSPIRACY

THE PIMPERNEL PLOT

THE ZENDA VENDETTA

THE NAUTILUS SANCTION

THE KHYBER CONNECTION

THE ARGONAUT AFFAIR (coming in August)

PSYCHODROME

SIMON HAWKE

ACE BOOKS, NEW YORK

For M. S.

PSYCHODROME

An Ace Book / published by arrangement with

the author

PRINTING HISTORY

Ace edition / July 1987

All rights reserved.

Copyright © 1987 by Simon Hawke.

Cover art by Neal McPheeters.

This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part,
by mimeograph or any other means, without permission.
For information address: The Berkley Publishing Group,
200 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016.

ISBN: 0-441-68791-1

Ace Books are published by

The Berkley Publishing Group,

200 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

-PROLOGUE-

I didn't know if I was in a war or if Psychodrome was playing
mind games. It works both ways. You play Psychodrome and
Psychodrome plays you. If this was a hallucinact, the only
way to tell would be when it was over. Assuming I survived. A
hallucinact is not supposed to kill you, but if your mind
believes your death is real, it might persuade your body. And
my body was getting some heavy doses of reality.
The combat armor I was wearing was supposed to be state-of-the-art
equipment, but it was state-of-the-art equipment
that had been contracted out to the lowest bidder, something
you don't really want to think about while under heavy fire. I
couldn't help thinking about it because the recirculating and
cooling system in my suit wasn't working properly. I was
sweating like a pig and having trouble breathing. It felt like
being locked in an ambulatory sauna bath. The home audience
was getting a graphic taste of what it felt like to be a human
tank, advancing through a bug-infested jungle that was bursting
into flame. Of course, if this particular tank took a direct

I

2
	SIMON HAWKE

hit from a plasma rocket, the "death" of the home audience
would only be a vicarious experience--appropriately edited--and
they could then switch channels and tune into another
fantasy. I, on the other hand, would either wake up screaming
or experience an incredibly brief instant of unutterable agony
before I turned into a smoking, gelatinous puddle on the
jungle floor. That's entertainment.

A war always got good ratings. There was a time when I
didn't understand that. As a child, I played with toys of violence
and rained death upon my playmates, who usually stubbornly
refused to die, insisting that I'd missed them. There
would then ensue heated arguments concerning their mortality.
Sometimes the consensus of opinion would declare a pre-pubescent
little soldier KIA, but it didn't really matter except
as a momentary blow to pride. We all lived to die another day.
I didn't understand it--then.

The ugly truth is that violence is life affirming. If it's a fantasy,
it gives you the illusion, the vicarious experience, of confronting
the reality of your own ephemeral existence. If what
you're witnessing is real, it especially compels your fascination.
It may frighten you, outrage you, shock you, or depress
you, but in some deeply buried aspect of your psyche, there is
a frightened little guilt-racked thing that huddles like a Judas,
making you feel good because it isn't happening to you. No .
matter how real the illusion or how graphic the reality, you

will survive to die another day. Escapist entertainment. With
the accent on escape. They say it's cathartic, but if it really is a
cleansing, purifying thing, we seem to need repeated doses of
it. And Psychodrome supplies them in abundance.

I glanced over to the right and saw Breck advancing on my
flank, looking like some giant, ugly robot painted O.D. green.
Winters was about a dozen yards or so ahead of us, taking the
point. Behind us were about thirty other grunts, mercenaries
all, encased in combat armor and moving ponderously
through the jungle with a whine of servo-motors while the
enemy laid down a barrage of plasma rockets all around. They
couldn't see us yet, but they had a fairly good idea where we
were and their idea was getting better all the time.

There was a major difference between the other mercenaries
and Breck, Winters, and myself. The others were getting paid
extremely well to risk their lives for Consolidated Developers,
Inc., while the thre of us were being provided free of charge

	PSYCHODROME
	3

in exchange for exclusive broadcast rights. Oh, and there was
one other difference, too. All they had to do was stay alive and
defeat the opposition, the forces of a rival multinational disputing
CDI's claim to this insect-ridden hothouse of a planet.
The three of us had a somewhat loftier objective. Together or
independently, we were upposed to win a combat decoration.
And, with any luck, we'd win ours before players on competing
teams won theirs, which would enable us to advance to
the next stage of the gaming round.

There was no safe way to make an overflight of the objective
and drop down on the enemy, because a high-altitude
drop meant plenty of time for them to pick us off and a low-altitude
drop meant making easy targets of the personnel carriers.
Bombing was out of the question, as was the use of
orbital particle beam weaponry, not only because it would
destroy the equipment and facilities we were hoping to capture
intact, but because it was against the rules.

It was all right for corporations to have private armies
pounding each other into jelly on some undeveloped piece of
rock, but it had to be done in a way that didn't violate any international
weapons treaties. No government wanted to get involved
officially, not only for political reasons, but for
economic ones, as well. No one wanted to back what could
wind up being the losing side. It was easier to sit back and let
the corporations fight a limited war that jeopardized no one
except the mercenaries fighting it. The executives battled in
their boardrooms while the soldiers fought on the disputed territory
and, one way or another, the claim was eventually settled.
Then the winner came in, developed the real estate, and
once a colony was formally established, the politicians recognized
it and took advantage of a fait accompli with no territorial
disputes and no investment outlay.

The political ramifications of this conflict did not concern
me any more than did the outcome. I couldn't care less who
won, so long as one of the three of us managed to win a combat
decoration. The sooner that happened, the sooner we'd be
out of the jungle and on our way to the next scenario of the
gaming round. Some game! You could get killed playing this
game. And to think the only reason I got into it was because I
wanted to survive.

A plasma rocket hit so close that I was caught in the blast
and almost knocked over, no mean feat considering the suits

4
	SIMON HAWKE

weigh several tons. A huge sheet of flame washed over me as I
continued to advance through the roiling black and orange
cloud and I felt the temperature inside the suit rise appreciably.

Breck's laconic chuckle came over my helmet speaker.
"Getting a bit warm for you, O'Toole?"

"Cut the chatter!" the group commander broke in.

"With all due respect, Major," I heard Breck say, his
smooth Teutonic voice as dry as sherry, "the enemy now has a
fix on our position. I would advise a change of strategy before
several well-placed rockets take out the entire unit."

The major hesitated. When a man like Rudiger Breck
spoke, even a veteran mercenary group commander listened. ·
Before Breck lost his arm, he was an officer in the SS. The
commandos of the Special Service are a very strange, rare
breed. They're bio-engineered and trained for service from the
creche. Their motto is "Born to Raise Hell" and they are utterly
capable of it.

"What would you advise, Breck?"

"Open skirmish formation. And I would send out several
flankers to deploy jet paks and lay down covering fire. We
cannot effectively return fire until we break free of the brush.
Without covering fire, we may never have that opportunity."

"Anybody who takes to the air is going to be a target," said
the major. "And if the insects foul the jet paks--"

"A jump is necessary for the flankers to get into position,"
said Breck. "As for their being targets, it will help the unit if
they draw enemy fire. At the moment, all of us are targets, are
we not?"

"That's asking several men to commit suicide just so the
rest of us can get into position," said the major.

I could almost hear Breck shrug. "A calculated risk," he
said. "One I am well prepared to take. O'Toole will join me,
won't you, O'Toole?"

"Thanks, Rudy. Thanks loads."

"There, you see? You have two volunteers already. Stone,
what do you say, shall we make it a party?"

I couldn't see Stone Winters anymore, she was too far
ahead, but her voice came back strong and steady. "I'm
game."

"You realize they can probably hear every word you're saying,
don't you?" said the major.

	PSYCHODROME
	5

"And what difference does it make?" said Breck. "It's getting
a bit warm down here and I could use a little air."

"Okay, Breck, go ahead," the major said. "It's your ass.
Form open skirmish line!"

"Stone, you jump flank right, I'll take the left," said Breck.

"O'Toole, you take left flank with me."

"I got it."

"Breck," I said, "I sure hope you know what you're
doing."

"You can't win the game by playing safe, O'Toole. We
jump on three. Do try not to get shot down immediately.
Stand by... One! Two! Three!"

I damned Breck to hell and hit the thrusters on my jet pak.
The audience at home was going to get a first-class show. I
could imagine some fat slob sitting in his living room, plugged
into his psych-fidelity set and sharing my experience. He was
about to lift off with me into a blaze of glory, flying high
above the jungle in his combat armor with his trusty auto-pulser
spitting death down at the enemy while the air around
him was full of bugs and plasma rockets and autopulser fire
and more bugs and I hoped he had a heart condition so the
blind panic I was feeling would rupture his aorta. No such
luck, though. Psy-fi sets had bio-feedback sensors that would
shut down the system if the armchair gloryhound got too excited.
Unfortunately, I had no such safeguards.

I felt the press of G-forces as the suit jets fired and hurled
me above the treetops as if the armor didn't weigh a thing.
Several thoughts flew through my mind at once. I thought
about what would happen if the jets got fouled or if the retros
wouldn't fire: I'd make a large hole when I landed. I thought
about what would happen if I flew right into a plasma rocket
or autopulser ground fire. I could take some autopulser fire
and still retain my suit integrity, but a plasma rocket would incinerate
me in an instant. And I thought about what I would
do to Breck when I realized that only Stone and I had made
the jump. The son of a bitch had suckered us and now we were
committed.

I saw the giant dome of our objective below and directly
ahead of us and then I had no more time for thinking as the air
around me filled with enemy fire. Stone had angled off away
from me, to the right of where our unit was positioned, and I
angled to the left, then started my descent. I slotted the enemy

SIMON HAWKE

batteries in their small emplacement domes and opened up on
them from the air. Amazingly, I hit one and was gratified by
the sight of a lovely fireball where a rocket launcher had been
a moment earlier, making things highly unpleasant for me.
And then I realized I had made a very bad mistake. I was coming
in too close. It was all happening too fast for a combat
rookie like myself and I was not only going to land too close, I
was going to land right on top of them.

I felt autopulser blasts slamming into my suit as i hit my
retros and burned several enemy soldiers who weren't quick
enough to dive out of the way. I crashed through the hole my
retros had burned in the emplacement dome and felt the shock
through my spine as I landed, a shock that would have driven
my legs clear up into my shoulders if the suit had not absorbed
most of it. I started firing blindly in every direction. I was so
scared that it wasn't until almost half an hour later that I
noticed the smell inside my suit.

I was still firing when I suddenly realized there was no one
left to shoot at. I stepped over several bodies and took control
of the rocket launcher. All I could think about was taking out
the other gun emplacements before they decided to drop a
rocket on me. I didn't really know how to handle the controls,
but the knowledge must have been programmed into me during
game orientation, because I was functioning on automatic
pilot. I felt the entire emplacement swivel on its pad and the
launcher lowered its elevation, angling down toward the other
gun emplacements. They had to see what I was up to and I was
praying that I could do it to them before they did it to me. I
saw one of the other batteries start to swivel towards me and I
opened fire. I scored a direct hit and an orange and black
cloud shaped like a giant ball flowered and rose into the sky.

I immediately tracked onto another target and opened fire
again and saw a wonderful repeat performance, then the unit
was breaking cover and moving out into the open in a spread-out
skirmish line, firing at will.

Then there was a flash of fire and I don't remember what
happened after that. I woke up flat on my back a considerable
distance from the emplacement dome. My suit integrity was
intact, which was astonishing when I saw how battered and
blackened it was on the outside. There was an incessant ringing
in my ears and blood was running from my nose and
mouth. Breck's handsome, hard-featured face was staring

	PSYCHODROME
	7

d6wn at me from behind the faceplate of his helmet. His glittering,
ice-blue eyes were gazing at me mockingly and I heard
his chuckle over the ringing in my ears.

"Well done, O'Toole. Congratulations. You're a hero."
"Where the hell were you?"

"Jets malfunctioned. Damnedest thing--they seem to be
working perfectly now." He grinned. "I just heard from
Mondago. You were a major hit. The ratings were spectacular.
They had to edit out certain involuntary reactions, so you
came out looking like a one-man war machine. The major's
putting you in for a commendation. We can leave soon as
you've changed your shorts."

The last thing I heard before I passed out again was that
goddamned chuckle. I was growing to hate that chuckle
almost as much as I was growing to hate Breck. Some teammate.
Some game.

-ONE-

"Honor is a word for virgins and tombstones, O'Toole."

Hakim Saqqara was smiling when he said that, but somehow
I did not find that very reassuring. He was tall and slim,
elegant and darkly handsome, soft-spoken, charming, and utterly
deadly, with about as much regard for human life as his
pharaonic ancestors.

My own ancestry is Irish and Russian, which means I believe
in luck, but don't really expect to get it. The Irish part of me
was counting on all the magical companions of my race to pull
me through while my Russian half was trying to plunge me
into black despair, fully expecting a cruel and vengeful God to
punish me. My life was a constant battle between my Irish and
Russian aspects. My leprechauns were what got me into this
mess in the first place and now there was a chorus of Russian
archbishops singing in stentorian baritone at the back of my
mind, sounding an ancient Orthodox funeral dirge.

"Honor means a little more to me than that, Hakim," I
said, summoning up my most sincere voice. There's nothing

8

	PSYCHODROME
	9

like fear to bring out sincerity and even as an image on a
screen, Hakim Saqqara scared me. "You know my word's
always been good."

"True," Saqqara said, "but think how it would affect my
other business interests if I were to let you off. I'd be more or
less expected to offer the same leniency to others. You see my
problem, don't you?"

He sounded so regretful that I almost felt sorry for him. I
wished there was some way I could be more helpful and give
him a reason not to have me killed.

"Look, Hakim, let's stop being so formal and polite and get
down to the bottom line here. The bottom line is that I owe
you a rather large sum of money and I haven't got a rather
large sum of money at the moment. Now I wouldn't be much
good to you lying at the bottom of Tokyo Bay, except as an
object lesson to your other so-called 'business interests,' but
alive and kicking, I'm at least a piece of functional meat you
can still get some use out of. Does it make sense to ignore my
potential value? Would that really be good business?"

Saqqara stopped smiling. Now I knew I was in trouble. The
Russian chorus in my brain began to bellow in full voice. The
leprechauns started to scream Gaelic obscenities at them and
my head began to hurt. Saqqara's voice cut through the mist
of pain and panic like a katana.

"You are an imprudent man, O'Toole," he said, steepling
his fingers and gazing at me over them. "You are like a little
dog that barks at a hound four times its size. You do not give
enough thought to the consequences of your actions. I might
have chosen to regard you as nothing more than an annoyance,
but even the largest dog cannot ignore a puppy once
it stops barking and decides to bite. You have figuratively
fastened your tiny teeth upon my ankle and you have left me
no choice but to shake you off.., decisively."

I swallowed hard and cleared my throat. "What do you
mean by... decisively?"

He spoke very softly. "There are people within my organization
who specialize in making difficult decisions."

My mouth was very dry. "That's one of the reasons why I
called you. I was hoping there was some way we could avoid
your having to . . . make a difficult decision. I seem to be
doing pretty well in the game so far--"

He smiled. "Yes, I know. I have been following your ex-

10
	SIMON HAWKE
ploits. Quite amusing, really, knowing you as I do."
"Well, what I was getting at... that is, if my team wins, I
stand to make a fair amount of money. I was thinking--"
"That you could buy me off?" Saqqara said. He shook his
head sadly. "I'm afraid not, O'Toole. It's more than the
money. You've caused me to lose face. If it was just the
money, perhaps we could arrive at some sort of rapprochement,
but you've made it a matter of personal pride. I wish
you the best of luck in your new career, I really do. Actually, it
isn't all that new, is it? You're still a gambler, only the stakes
are higher. Care to make a little side bet?" He smiled. I'll
wager that my, uh, 'decision makers' dispose of your assets
before the game does. What do you say? Even money?"
I sighed. "No bet. Good-bye, Hakim."
"Nice knowing you, O'Toole."
The screen went blank. So much for any chance of quitting
the game and going back to Tokyo. I'd been hoping there was
some way Saqqara and I could cut a deal, but my call to him
had settled the matter once and for all. I had to give him credit
for being straight with me, at least. But on the other hand, I
knew him well enough to understand his motives. He could
have lied to me and tricked me into going back to Tokyo,
thereby drastically reducing my life expectancy, but that
would have been too easy. He knew me well enough to understand
exactly how I felt about playing Psychodrome. I'm
basically a coward and Psychodrome can be a terrifying game.
However, his "decision makers," as he euphemistically referred
to them, were still more terrifying.
They were properly called ninjas, a term stemming from the
word ninjitsu, which means "the silent way." Originally a secret
guild of assassins dating back to the days of the samurai,
they were trained almost from birth to kill quickly, silently,
and efficiently. They were so good at it, they were believed to
be supernatural. Supposedly, the guild had disappeared when
Japan became westernized, but the Yakuza revived them, adding
a new wrinkle with bio-engineering. The modern ninjas
were supposed to be quite capable of giving Special Service
commandos a real run for their money. That ancient, quasi-mystical,
octopoid entity known as the Yakuza has controlled
organized crime in Japan for generations and they had come a
long, long way since their sword-wielding beginnings. I didn't
know who the shoguns of the Yakuza were now and I didn't

	PSYCHODROME
	11

want to know. I only knew one of their minor factotums and
Saqqara was frightening enough.

It amused him to be able to plug into the net and experience
me sweating out the game scenarios of Psychodrome, knowing
that when his assassins finally caught up to me, my termination
would become a mass media event he would be able to experience
vicariously. It was an elegant way of saving face and
Hakim preferred to do things elegantly. Just staying out of
Tokyo would not guarantee my survival.

I remembered what it felt like seeing Tokyo for the first
time, looking up at its purple sky with the massive spires of the
city towering above me and skycabs threading their way between
the spanways. It was September of 2425. I was twenty-six
years old, fresh out of the service, without a job, but I had
enough money in my pockets to last me for about a month--or
about two days if I decided to enjoy myself. I was only
passing through. Five years later, I was still there, because like
a fool I had decided to enjoy myself.

The first thing I had done was get drunk. I'm not sure what
the second thing was. Sometime during that night, I had
picked up a tattoo of a dragon--never mind where--and a girl
named Miko. I woke up in a tiny cubicle on ground level in a
section of the city known as Junktown. There was about
enough room in that little prefabricated cell for two people to
turn around in if they knew each other really well; there were
five people living there. I woke up to the sight of Mama-san,
Papa-san, and two prepubescent daughters-san sitting crosslegged
around the bedpad, grinning down at me and nodding.
Miko was lying next to me, as naked as I was, and the reason
they all seemed so pleased about it was that at some point she
had become Mrs. Arkady O'Toole, which meant she was my
responsibility and there would be more room in the apartment.
My Irish half was still hung over from the nuptuals and
my Russian half was contemplating suicide.

I felt I was too young to settle down. I had no idea of
Miko's age. She didn't look a day over sixteen. I never did
find out exactly how old she was. I don't think she knew
herself. She and her family were nonregistered, along with
everybody else in that slummy neighborhood, and at the time,
she spoke almost no English. She couldn't even pronounce my
name. She called me "Akadee" and when she tried to say my
last name, it came out "Otto."

12
	SIMON HAWKE
From a strictly legal standpoint, there was no way to make
the marriage stick. As nonregs, they had no civil rights of any
sort. You can't take legal action against someone if, legally,
you don't exist. But I didn't know that at the time. They had
scraped together what little money they had and hired a priest ·
or monk of some sort to officiate and make it legal, at least in
the spiritual sense. The signature on the scroll they showed me
was little more than a drunken scrawl, but it was recognizably
mine. The marriage was real in the eyes of their ancestors and
I had enough trouble with mine without taking on a bunch of
Japanese.
Under the circumstances, I could have done a whole lot
worse than Miko. She had long, jet black hair which she wore
in a thick braid down the side of her chest and the biggest,
loveliest almond-shaped eyes I had ever seen. Her figure was
slim and coltish, she had long and shapely legs and a face so
innocently pretty it was impossible to believe there could be
any guile behind it. How a place like Junktown could produce
a flower of such fragile beauty was beyond me, but Junktown
produces them by the thousands every year and, if they're
lucky, they manage to find their way out into the upper levels
of the city.
To give you a rough idea what it's like down there, a career
as a prostitute on the Ginza Strip is considered a step up for a
pretty young girl from Junktown. Parents often go out of
their way to cultivate good contacts with the sleazy Ginza
pimps who scout the territory every now and then, in the hope
that a pretty daughter will be able to buy passage for the family
to a somewhat more survivable environment. A hard life
brings hard priorities. Miko's parents were ecstatic. She had
actually found a husband.
I was in a considerable state of alarm. Not only was I married,
but I had suddenly inherited five dependents and I had
no place to live and hardly any money left. There was no one
on Earth to whom I could turn for help. The only family I had
left was my dad back in Bradbury, on Mars, and if he knew of
my predicament, he would've laughed himself sillY. Sean
O'Toole was not the kind of father a son could ask for help. I
knew just what he'd have said, after he had finished laughing.
"Fucked up again, huh? Well, I'm sure you'll figure something
out. Be sure and send me holos of the kids."

	PSYCHODROME
	13

Spending the rest of my life in a Junktown closet wasn't my
idea of domestic bliss, so I assigned my hangover to my Russian
ancestors and sat back to see if the leprechauns could
come up with anything. Luck, for a change, was with me.
That is, if you can call what happened in the long run luck.

The Lord giveth with one hand and smiteth with the other
and my leprechauns figured that since I had already been duly
smitten, I was in line for some of the good old giveth. So I did
what any self-respecting Irishman would do when he was truly
up against it. I had a couple of drinks and went looking for a
game of poker.

Now when you've set your mind to lay the cards down and
take a risk, there's no point in being small-time about it. I
learned at least that much from the old man. I wasn't going to
find a game in Junktown, so I headed uptown, straight up to
level three and the Ginza Strip, the only other place I'd seen so
far in Tokyo. It was where I had met Miko, I suppose, though
I had no recollection of the meeting.

The Ginza Strip is a small city unto itself. It's like a giant arcade.
I've come to know it very well since then, but that day
was only the beginning of my education. I heard about the
Ginza of Tokyo from other guys in the service and I'd always
wanted to see it for myself. I never thought I'd wind up living
there.

The first thing that hits you on the Ginza are the lights. Red
lights, green lights, blue lights, purple lights--every color of
the rainbow flashes from a thousand different signs advertising
everything from gambling saloons and tattoo parlors to
drug emporiums and whorehouses. The second thing that hits
you on the Ginza Strip, unless you're either quick or lucky, is
usually a scooter.

According to some arcane and ancient custom, the moment
a socially awkward Japanese boy reaches the earliest stages of
approaching manhood, complete with undirected sexual stirrings
and homicidal impulses, he's issued a set of lycras and a
scooter. These bushido bandit gangs in their skintight lycras,
studded boots and gloves, and crested full-face helmets slalom
through the traffic on garishly painted skimmer sleds covered
with aerodynamic plastic bodyword at speeds you'd have to
see to believe. They make amazing turns with thrusters on full
power, hanging off the sides of their "scooters," and they ride

14
	SIMON HAWKE

in packs. Quite frequently, they hit things. People, cabs, each
other, the sides of buildings... The results are nearly always
fatal.

The Tokyo police don't really interfere because the bandits
hopelessly outnumber them and if the bandits crash and burn,
it's worth the price of the occasional window or civilian. The
Tokyo police don't concern themselves too much with what
happens on the lower levels of the city anyway and they know
better than to venture down below the third level. There are no
crime statistics among the nonregs. How can there be crime
among people who don't exist?

The third thing that hits you on the Ginza Strip is usually
either a hooker, a mugger, a pickpocket, or a shill for one of
the gaming houses. I had already seen the lights and had
somehow avoided being jellied by a bushido bandit. I preferred
not to think too much about the circumstances under
which I had met Miko. I was still in uniform and that meant I
was a prize mark, so what hit me was a shill.

My Russian archbishops were entirely too hung over to exercise
their usual cautionary influence, so my leprechauns
were free to go berserk. I had a run of luck the like of which I
hadn't seen before or since. Old Sean would have been proud
of me. I also had a little bit of help in the form of a token I had
obtained from an old friend in the service. I had told him that
the first thing I was going to do upon my discharge was visit
Earth and hit the Ginza, so he had slipped me a set of SS insignia.
The insignia consists of two collar pins with the stylized
scarlet double lightning bolts and a silver breastpin of the
double helix strand of DNA, meant to be worn above the rows
of campaign ribbons and decorations.

The people on the Ginza know about SS commandos, even
though they've rarely seen them. The Commandos consider
the Ginza a bit too tame for their sort of R & R. Still, the few
times soldiers of the Special Service had done some unwinding
on the Ginza, they left a lasting impression. The greatest risk I
faced wearing the insignia was running into someone who was
born to wear it, but it was a negligible risk considering the
margin of safety it gave me.

There are straight games on the Ginza and there are crooked
ones and it takes either professional instincts or Irish ancestry
to tell the difference. The odds are with the house in either
case, but the crooked ones generally sucker in the mark by let-

	PSYCHODROME
	15

ting him win a few times before dropping the hammer. The
trick is in anticipating when they're going to turn on you and
my leprechauns, bless their larcenous little hearts, didn't let
me down. Somehow, I sensed the burn each time and got out
before the house nailed me. Ordinarily, things can get a little
tense when you do that, with people prevailing on you not to
leave, but even on the Ginza they thought twice about getting
on the wrong side of someone wearing SS insignia. All it took
was a long silence and a serious look to convince them they
could make it up with the next sucker. That was fortunate,
because I can look real serious if I want to, but I generally act
real foolish.

I eventually wound up in a very intense game. Indeed. It was
the game I had started out to find, though I never dreamed I'd
end up with such a group of heavyweights. It was in the plush-est
nightclub on the Ginza, a place where if you walk in and
you look like you don't belong, they carry you out in pieces. A
place called the Pyramid Club. A place owned by a sophisticated,
charming, snakelike Egyptian gentleman named Hakim
Saqqara.

The flash of satori came to me when I drew to an inside
straight and made it. I suddenly realized there was no way I
could lose. I'd been having an unbelievable run of luck up to
the time I got there, but when I sat down to that table with
those very refined and very serious-looking gentlemen, I
started feeling very apprehensive. I was way out of my league.
The room was elegant and understated, with plush gray carpeting
and antique furnishings. The refreshments they consumed
so casually were eagerly sought after by gourmets and
oenophiles and they were served silently by women guaranteed
to break your concentration--only no one's concentration
wavered except mine. And when I saw the size of that pot, I
realized that unless I was fantastically lucky, I could survive
for one or two hands at the most, despite all my previous winnings,
and then I'd be right back where I started.

I had bluffed my way in by pretending to be something that
I wasn't and by pretending also that I was a lot more flush
than I really was. I couldn't exactly clear my throat, mutter
polite excuses, claim an old war wound had suddenly flared
up, and leave. They wouldn't have taken that very well at all.
There was absolutely no way out. And then I drew to that inside
straight.

	16
	SIMON HAWKE

I don't know how I knew, but I knew. And I knew it so
damn for certain that they knew it too and one by one, they
folded. All it would have taken was one bluff, one balls down
"l'!l see you and I'll raise you" and I would've been dead
meat, but it didn't happen. The pot was mine and I was God. I
rained the plagues of Job upon them for the next three hours,
and then a little switch tripped inside my brain and I knew my
lucky streak had ended. I managed to lose gracefully and cn-servatively
for the next few hands, just long enough to make it
look good, then I got my sweet alabaster ass the hell out of
there and Irina O'Toole's dark-haired, blue-eyed baby boy
had come a cropper.

I secured lodgings for myself and my bride on level fifteen
and obtained a new home and registrations for her family. In
the process, I discovered my marriage wasn't legal and was

vised that I could either make it legal or ignore it. Officially, it
had never happened. Well, I had been drunk and I hadn't
known it wasn't legal, but I had slurred my troth or whatever
and I was prepared to stand by it. Drunk or sober, a man's
word is a man's word. However, Miko didn't really want to
hold me to it.

Between her broken English and the help of an interpreter,
she made me understand that my windfall had resulted in a
situation for herself and for her family that was more than
anything she could have hoped for. She said I was under no
real obligation, but if I would consent to loaning her some
money so she could get some schooling and find a job to help
support her family, she would promise to repay it all eventually
and let me go with the hope that we could still be friends.

I didn't believe the money would ever be repaid, but I didn't
really care. I couldn't remember exactly how we came to the
state of wedded bliss, but if she had taken advantage of my inebriated
condition, who was I to blame her? A life in Junk-town
is a life of quiet desperation and desperate people are
driven to do desperate things. I agreed to give her the money.
We remained together for a while so we could help each other
with our beginnings, then after several months we went our
separate ways, promising to keep in touch--though I doubted
we would. I managed to convince a prestigious brokerage firm
that I was just the lad to lend their establishment some
panache, then I settled down in my new home with my re-

	PSYCHODROME
	17

pared to embark upon a few profitable investments and a
lovely, affluent life-style. And then Saqqara found me.

Luck can be a lot like magic. Sometimes it doesn't work for
you, but when it does, it always exacts a price. But I was still
naive then, a condition that wouldn't last much longer. I was
naive enough to believe it was a simple case of serendipity.
Saqqara was looking to make a few investments and "just
happened" to contact my firm.

My pessimistic Russian ancestors must have been asleep.
Russians grow torpid when they're being well fed. Saqqara
played me like the pro he was. He remembered me and seemed
surprised, but impressed at how I had parlayed my winnings.
To show there were no hard feelings, he made friendly overtures.
Invitations to dinner at his club and introductions to
people a man in my position "could benefit from knowing"
led to investment contacts and opportunities. I was suckered
in because Saqqara was so smooth and charming and because
he knew some very influential, very prominent people. And
because it never occurred to me that very influential, very
prominent people could have some very nasty skeletons in
their closets--closets to which Saqqara had the key.

By the time my Russian ancestors finally woke up and
started singing songs of doom, I was well and truly had.
Businesses I had invested in on Saqqara's advice, both on my
own behalf and that of many of my clients, turned out to be
fronts for some highly illegal activities. That was when I
learned Hakim Saqqara was a far more elegant poker player
than I could have imagined.

He never forgave me for the drubbing I gave him. It offended
his pride. He just couldn't bear to lose, especially to a
small-time hustler like me. He was an Egyptian who had
grown up in Japan and been initiated into the mysteries of the
Yakuza, resulting in a Machiavellian creature of frightening
complexity. For him, the game did not end at the table. He did
not lose often, but if he lost heavily to some well-heeled
business magnate with a weakness for the sort of entertainment
his nightclub could provide, he made it up some other
way, usually through exploitation of the contact. He could
easily have had me rolled after I left the club and taken all my
winnings, but that would have been too easy a revenge. He
wanted to destroy me. He watched and waited and he must
have smiled a lot when he saw how he could use me. He built

18
	SIMON HAWKE

my coffin, handed me the hammer, and I pounded in the nails.
The only solution was to buy my way out. And so I started
buying. It was the beginning of the great big turnaround, a
squeeze that lasted for four years. You might wonder what
kind of man puts up with something like that for so long. The
kind of man who's fond of living, that's what kind. Why
didn't I cut and run? Because I had no idea of what I was letting
myself in for. Because I had a comfortable, pleasant lifestyle
to which I had rapidly grown accustomed; because I had
a good job; because I had some profitable investments and
because I thought I could somehow keep it all and wriggle off
the hook. Instead, I gradually became more and more impaled
until Saqqara owned me.
Bit by bit, I bought my way out of the pit my friend Hakim
had dug for me, but to buy my way out of one thing that
would incriminate me was to buy my way into something else
that tied me more firmly to the Ginza Strip and to Saqqara.
The seam was brilliant. I couldn't afford his upfront asking
price, but he was more- than willing to be flexible. All I had to
do was sign something over to him "for security" and take
over the "management" of his holdings on the Oinza. Little
by little, the legal documents with my name naively on them
that firmly established my credentials as a major shark and
racketeer became exchanged for business interests on the
Oinza that established me as something much closer to what I
really was--a small-time operator and con artist who had
lucked into some money. Saqqara pulled off a major coup of
paper shuffling in which his interests on the Ginza became
exchanged for mine, which he in turn managed with an
acumen infinitely more acute. By the time it was all over,
Saqqara was a well-respected business magnate who ran a seedy little empire on the Ginza traceable directly to yours
truly, who took a minor cut for all his trouble. A cut the
largest portion of which went right back into Saqqara's
pocket.
Imagine the surprise of my respectable employers when they
learned that one of their most successful account executives
held a controlling interest in a chain.of saloons, brothels, and
gaming houses on the Strip. And imagine their chagrin and
horror when they learned how I had implicated them, albeit
unknowingly, in a number of business transactions which, if
examined very closely, would bring their brokerage house

	PSYCHODROME
	19

tumbling down upon their heads. They wasted no time getting
rid of me and scrambling to clean house, which meant dealing
with Saqqara. I tried to warn them, but they weren't really
listening as they kicked me out the door. Consequently, they
were even more surprised a few months later when they discovered
that Saqqara had moved in and taken over their establishment,
lock, stock, and portfolios.

During all this time, I had been fighting desperately to find
a way to get free of Saqqara and still manage to keep some of
what I had, only there wasn't any way that I could find. Going
to the authorities would have been suicide, partly because Saq-qara
had set things up so I would go down with him and partly
because he had his fingers in that pie, as well. The minute I
went to the police, he'd know and I'd never have survived to
testify against him. In the end, I had sold everything I owned
and was left without an income. No other brokerage house
would touch me. The word was out that I was poison. I had no
other skills and jobs were nonexistent. I was too old to reenlist
and too broke to go anywhere else. I was already living on the
Ginza, having been forced out of my fifteenth level conapt,
and I had become a liability to Saqqara because I had nothing
left to lose.

I knew him well enough by then to put myself into his shoes
and decide what to do about me. I could, if I were him, use me
as a flunky in fact instead of in name only to run my operations
on the Ginza, but why bother? I had become a fabulously
wealthy, well-respected businessman with friends and
contacts in high places. People I ran into in my present life
who knew about my past were people who had no business
knowing unless they had a past as well and chances were I
already had them well under my thumb. No one could connect
me to the Ginza anymore. No one except O'Toole, who was
uncomfortably well informed about me. And he had nothing
left to lose...

I decided that if I were Saqqara, I would definitely have me
killed. What a delightful, cheerful thought. There seemed to
be only one thing left to do. Run. Jump into the ocean and
swim to New Zealand. Get out of Tokyo, get out of Japan, get
out of sight and stay there. I told myself to take what few
lousy possessions I had left, everything except the clothes on
my back, and sell them for whatever I could get--"Buy into a
game and win your stake to a new life!" my leprechauns sug-

20
	SIMON HAWKE

gested, but I screamed at them to shut up--and then I got
home to find a crowd of people waiting for me, shouting and
jumping up and down. I had won the lottery. The leprechauns
were giggling. I was going to be the next big star of Psycho-drome.

It was a truly silly joke. Under other circumstances, I might
have found it funny. Never, never, never antagonize the
leprechauns. They'll get even in the most devastating way. My
neighbors in the rats' nest where I lived had no idea I was the
nominal owner of half the bloodsucking establishments on our
little section of the Strip. They figured, and quite rightly so,
that I was just a fellow down-and-outer and they were ecstatic.
What happened to me had touched their lives. If it could happen
to one of their own, that meant it might happen to them
too and it gave them a little hope. Hope was a commodity in
short supply on the lower levels of the city.

I never had much time for fantasy escapism. I had been too
busy trying to escape from the reality of Hakim Saqqara, so
"the ultimate experience" held little fascination for me. As far
as I was concerned, the ultimate experience was death and I
was anxious to avoid it for as long as possible.

During the time we were together, Miko had been a rabid
devotee of Psychodrome, along with about three-quarters of
the population, so I was familiar with the game. The word
"game" was a bit of a misnomer for it. Psychodrome was
played for real and the stakes were high. And, from a callous
sort of viewpoint, it was the logical form of entertainment for
the modern world.

I wasn't particularly fond of this modern world. I think I
would have liked it much more in the past, say, in the twentieth
century or maybe the nineteenth. Back then, there was
lots of room for small-time hustlers. Mankind had not yet
moved out into space, planets had not yet been terraformed,
or colonies established or contacts made with other civilizations
which, in several cases, turned out not to appreciate our
saying hello at all. Geneticists were only beginning to play
around with strange new life forms, little realizing what was
behind the creaking door they were about to open. The human
lifespan was much shorter--though not as short as mine now
seemed to be--and robotics was a brand-new science I would
have urged them to abandon. In those days, they were con-

	PSYCHODROME
	21

cerned that there were too many people and not enough jobs.
If they only knew!

Still, in some ways, things had not changed all that much.
Those who had nothing still vastly outnumbered those who
had everything. There had been tremendous advances in technology,
but not everyone could afford the benefits. Human
nature hadn't really changed. We still had violence, we still
had hunger, and we still had crime. Among those fortunate
enough to have an abundance of leisure time, there was still a
desire for more creative ways to fill it. Among the jaded few
who had an abundance of everything, there was still a desire
for the fresh thrill. Among the hard-working middle classes,
there was still a desire for escapist entertainment and among
the many who had little or nothing, there was still the dream,
that vision of a golden opportunity that could lead to a better
life. For all of them, Psychodrome offered a unique solution,
a fantasy for every taste.

There were different levels to the game, some of which
could provide sybaritic pleasures on a bacchanalian scale,
while others provided adventure, challenge, and great risk.
Players rich enough to afford the ruinous entry fees were free
to choose their own scenarios from the adventures Psycho-drome
had to offer. The less fortunate could enter the lottery,
with the grand prize being the chance to play, but these "winners''
did not have the luxury allowed those who bought into
the game. They didn't get to choose their game scenarios and
they had no control over their experience. In that respect,
there were two levels to Psychodrome; one in which the
wealthy players got to use the game for interactive, exhibitionistic
entertainment and one in which the game got to use
the players. Those who fell into the latter category were generally
diehard thrillseekers, gamblers, or desperate individuals.
In other words, people very much like me. And there has never
been a shortage of such people.

Players about to embark upon "the ultimate experience"
were taken to the headquarters of Psychodrome International,
the megacorporate entity that operates the game. There the
prospective player was given a full medical and psychological
examination and a definitive "player database" was assembled.
The player was then taken into surgery, where a
special biochip was implanted into the cerebral cortex.

22
	SIMON HAWKE

About all I knew about this biochip was that it was semior-ganic,
incorporating hundreds of thousands of ultraminiatur-ized
circuits and components. It gave the player the ability to
interface directly with the Psychodrome computer banks, as
well as with Psychodrome's "playermaster" satellite network.
The player signed waivers assuming full responsibility and absolving
the company of any legal culpability, then entered the
final stages of" game initiation."

The game began when Psychodrome transported the player
to a selected scenario where the player was supposed to interact
with real people in real life situations in order to achieve
certain game objectives. It was possible to win, of course, but
still more possible to lose. And losing could mean death,
which made for great entertainment. The game scenarios
could be located anywhere on Earth or on another world or
from a fantasy devised by Psychodrome. It could be real or it
could be an illusory hallucinact. Only the playermaster knew.

As the player pursued the game objectives, the playermaster
at Psychodrome International was capable of interfacing with
that player to provide guidance or game clues, but never direct
assistance. If a player got into a jam, it was up to the player to
get out of it. And the fun part was that the playermaster satellite
network enabled the taChyon transmission via biochip of
the player's experiences in the game to Psychodrome, so they
could broadcast those experiences on mass media psych-fidel-ity
entertainment channels.

People using their psy-fi sets at home could follow the
adventures of various players and experience the game with
them by plugging into the net. Their psy-fi entertainment sys-tems-which
the company sold, of course--enabled them to
achieve a sort of electronic sensory link with the players. Each
player's experience was broadcast on a separate channel of the
system. By switching channels, the .home audience could
switch players, vicariously "becoming" those players. Home
viewers were also capable of some limited interaction with the
players by voting on game options. The vote was electronically
tallied and the results instantaneously transmitted to the
players via tachyon beam. The players then had the option of
following the "advice" of the home audience or not. However,
since ratings were important, there was a certain amount
of pressure on the players to act in a manner that would please
the audience.

	PSYCHODROME
	23

Realized game objectives resulted in fabulous prizes, as did
accumulated "experience points." There was even a small
group of Psychodrome professionals, people whose wealth
and/or skill at the game allowed them to become full-time
"psychos." These pros had the status of superstars among the
psychodroid home audience. They were the modern gladiators,
cult figures living a life of fantasy most people could
only dream of (or experience vicariously).
Miko had been hooked on it, but I had never been a
"psychodroid." I had plugged into the net with her a couple
of times, at her insistence, and shared in "the ultimate experience,''
but, unlike most people, it left me with a feeling of
distaste. It made me feel like a voyeur and I was left with the
sensation of having raped somebody's mind. Which, in effect,
was exactly what I had done, though the players were unaware
of it on any but the intellectual level. The link was only one-way. I suppose it was the ultimate vicarious thrill in a sense, as
if you were to rent someone else's body and consciousness in
order to live out a fantasy. One of Miko's favorite psychos
was a debauched socialite whose libidinous excesses she could
share by plugging into one of the lust channels. To my way of
thinking, that was exhibitionism on a truly gargantuan scale
and it made me a little sick.
I guess I'm something of an anachronism. I was born too
late and I'm too old-fashioned for my time. My ethics and morality aren't terribly flexible, though Saqqara did his best
to bend them out of shape. I'm not a prude and I'm not the
most sterling example of humanity, but I have no desire to
become any more decadent than the good Lord already made
me. He made me human and, being human, I'm... well, only
human, but there is a limit. I've approached my limitations
many times and looked out over the edge, but I've never had
any great desire to jump. I'm just an average guy with a good
line and an engaging smile, but I'm basically satisfied with
who and what I am. Long ago, I decided that I didn't want a
whole lot to do with The Man Upstairs, whether He's really
there or not, so I simply told Him, "Look, You deal 'em and
I'll play 'em and VII try not to cry about it, however it comes
out." And that's the way it's been. I've never wanted to be
anybody else.
Sean O'Toole was a real hell-raiser and a bastard in his time
and my mother, rest her gentle soul, was a patient and long-

24
	SIMON HAWKE

suffering woman who probably deserved a lot better than she
got, but, unlikely a pair as they may have been, they stuck
with each other most unfashionably and faced the world
together back to back. I wasn't quite so lucky as old Sean had
been, but I don't hedge my bets. If it's possible to be both a
cynic and a romantic at the same time, then I guess I'm it. The
only fantasy I have, really, is true love. But if there's one thing
I've learned in all my peregrinations, it's that you don't find it
by looking for it or by dreaming about it. You just take care of
business and if it comes along and says hello, you don't weigh
pros and cons. You just ante up and lay the cards down.

I was probably the last person in the world who wanted to
play Psychodrome. And I had won the lottery. I hadn't even
entered the damn thing. I had a vague memory of Miko telling
me she had bought chances for each of us, but the odds
against either of us winning were so astronomical that I'd
promptly forgotten all about it. And I had won. The leprechauns
were blowing raspberries and making rude gestures.
The Russian archbishops solemnly intoned that no good
would come of it, no good at all. If I could have sold my
chance, I'd have done it then and there, but it was nontransferable.
The computer had selected me and the only option I
had was to refuse the prize. It was on all the news channels;
my name was being announced over every psy-fi set as "the
lucky winner" of the latest drawing and that meant Saqqara
knew, as well.

I was suddenly famous. Saqqara would not want me to be
famous. All I wanted was to run away and hide, go where
nobody knew my name, and now everybody knew my name. I
had to give Saqqara credit. He certainly did not waste any
time. Even as my neighbors were congratulating me and slapping
me on the back, I saw his "business associates" working
their way through the crowd toward me. I offered up a silent
prayer to the People of the Sidhe and made an O'Toole-sized
hole in the crowd. I saw them pushing after me and treated
several of my neighbors most discourteously by knocking
them flat and running right over them.

I had no idea where I was going. I just ran as hard as I could
down to the end of the street and turned a corner, screaming
for help. There's one thing you can't find on the Ginza when
you really need it and that's help, but my leprechauns must
have been feeling guilty because they worked their magic and

	PSYCHODROME
	25
help came from a most unlikely source. In my headlong flight,
I plowed right into a squadron of bushido bandits. It was a
double rarity. The first rarity was that they were standing still and the second was that they didn't stomp me into mush for
slamming into one of their sleds. I was looking over my shoulder
at Saqqara's men and the next thing I knew, I was draped
over the rear of a tiger-striped sled with the wind knocked out
of me. A tiger-striped helmet with a long black crest and a
dark visor gazed down at me while I fought to get my breath
back. Somehow, I managed to gasp out, "Help me! They're
trying to kill meI"
The dark visor stared down at me and an amplified basso
reverb voice that sounded like a demon from hell came
through the vocodcr speaker in the helmet. "Hal, zen. Hang
tight."
Knowing what was coming, I hung on for all I was worth. I
take that back. I had no idea what was coming. As the black
lycra-suited bandit with the tiger-striped helmet hit the starter
button and the whine of the plastic-covered engine climbed
quickly to a howl, Saqqara's men turned the corner. The sleds
started to lift with a sound like wailing banshees and one of
Saqqara's boys made a bad mistake. He pulled out his gun and
started shooting.
His first couple of shots went wild, but his third one hit a
bandit just beside us as he lifted and inadvertently got into the line of fire. His scooter spun wildly, gyroscoping sideways,
slammed into the side of a building, and burst into a ball of
flame as the fucl tanks exploded.
The bandit whose sled I was hanging onto screamed with
rage. Amplified and processed through the vocoder in the hcl-met, the scream sounded like the bellow of a wounded dinosaur.
Our sled shot straight up into the air, banked sharply,
and came down in a screaming full throttle dive right at Saq-qara's
men. I quickly slipped my fcct into the snap-bindings,
clamped my fingers around the grab rail, and squinted my eyes
against the sudden rush of wind.
Saqqara's men fired wildly, then broke and scattered as the
bandits zoomed down at them. Tiger-stripe controlled the
scooter with one metal-studded leather hand and reached
down to his waist with the other, plucking loose one of the or-namcntal
metal conchas on his belt. Only it wasn't an ornamental
concha. It was a buzz disc. His thumb pressed the

26
	SIMON HAWKE

raised stud in the center and tiny serrated blades snikked out
all around it. With a quick flick of the wrist, he threw the
devilish device and as the stud was released, the little serrated
blades started whirring around. His aim was uncannily accurate.
The result was uncannily messy. We pulled out of our
power dive at the last possible instant, inches above street
level, and Tiger-stripe stood the scooter on its tail, his feet
secured in the snap-bindings as he hung off the side of it,
climbing fast and banking in one smoothly graceful motion. If
I had eaten lunch, I would've lost it.

The bandits broke formation and chased down what was
left of Saqqara's men, zooming low over the heads of pedestrians
who threw themselves flat and strafing their quarry with
plastic zip guns that fired nasty little metal needles with a
sound that went something like zzzzp-wheeeeew, high-pitched
and audible even over the whine of the scooter engines. It was
mayhem.

One of Saqqara's boys had the sense to get out of the street
and go sprinting down an alleyway, but Tiger-stripe spotted
him, threw his body sideways, hanging off the sled and banking
it in a full power dive right into the mouth of the alley after
him. The man heard the sound of the scooter's engine behind
him and broke to his right, into a passageway between two
buildings that was little more than shoulder-width. We made
an almost perfect right-angle turn and zoomed after him. It
was a cul-de-sac.

The man came to a stop almost at the wall and turned, the
desperate animal at bay. He leveled his pistol at us, but the one
shot he had time for never even came close. At the speed with
which we were moving, there was no way in hell to stop before
we hit the wall. I flashed ahead about one second and saw us
finishing off in a blaze of kamikaze glory as a fireball against
that wall. I shut my eyes, heard a dull klunck as we hit the gunman,
and then felt the scooter, still under full throttle, go up
and over, flying upside down back the way we came. Tiger-stripe
did a half roll and got us rightside up again, then threw
his body sideways making that impossible near-ninety-degree
turn and we were zooming up out of the alley, high above the
Ginza Strip. The other bandits fell into V formation behind
us. We headed downtown, toward the limits of the Strip and a
wonky neighborhood known as the Combat Zone.

Years ago, the Zone was an industrial sector, but now it was

	PSYCHODROME
	27

a no-man's-land of psychopathic derelicts and screamers. All
efforts to clean it out had failed, so they had given up, turned
everything off, and rebuilt around it, walling in as much of it
as possible. In the Zone, no one ever saw the sky. I had never
been in the Zone and I wasn't enthusiastic about visiting it,
but you don't just step off a skimmer sled when it's flying
above the streets fast enough to make your eyes water.
We approached a narrow breach high up in the wall outside
the Zone and Tiger-stripe made a wide, banking turn with the
other bandits following and falling into single-file formation,
like a swarm of bees entering a hive, and then we flew through
the fissure one by one, headlamps stabbing through the darkness.
It was like being in a giant mausoleum. We were inside some
huge, cavernous building. In the illumination of the head-lamps,
I could make out ancient machinery and some kind of
hoists and tracks overhead. It must have been a factory at one
time. I saw what looked like several primitive robotic assembly
lines and pieces of what seemed to be the once-manufactured
product hanging from various hoist tracks, metal frameworks
of square tubing with engines bolted into them. We passed
stacks of large crates that had been broken into and on one of
the more or less intact ones, I read the word "Honda." It
meant nothing to me.
We came out of the building, crossed a littered street, and
entered what was probably once a large warehouse. It was
tiered into several levels at the back. There must have been
power from portable generators, because there was some light
back there. I noticed armed bandits posted as we entered and,
moments later, the scooters settled with a diminishing whine
on the highest of the tiered decks. My ears were ringing and
my eyes were red and sore from windblast. The bandits dismounted
and started undoing their helmets. I discovered that
my hands were white-knuckled and frozen to the grab rail.
Tiger-stripe got off while I sat there, trying to will my hands to
open. They didn't seem to want to listen. I took a deep breath
and let it out slowly and my fingers finally let go. I looked up
at the dark visor of Tiger-stripe's crested helmet.
"Oomo arigato," I said. "Thank you for saving my life.
This zen's very grateful." I looked around uneasily. "I
think."
The helmet opened like a clamshell from the back and I

28
	SIMON HAWKE

stared as I saw that the long black crest was not a crest at all,
but hair that had been pulled through a slit in the helmet's top.
If I hadn't been so preoccupied earlier, I might have noticed
from the skintight black lycra suit that Tiger-stripe was not a
male.

She would have been breathtakingly beautiful if it wasn't
for the ugly, jagged scar that ran all the way down the left side
of her face. Without the scar, it would have been the face of a
kokeshi doll, except that her features were too sharp and her
mouth and eyes were hard. Very, very hard.

She had one of those small, bittersweet sort of smiles, the
kind where the mouth barely moves and the lips curl down
slightly at the corners. Her natural, unvocodered voice was
soft and slightly breathy, incongruously like a little girl's.

Only little girls don't drill you with gunfighter eyes and say,
"Fuck me."

And if she was a little girl, I wouldn't have.

We lay side by side on a bare bedpad on the floor behind
some crates with a candle guttering in a holder made out of
some old scooter engine part. She had her long bare leg
hooked over mine and her elbow bent, head propped up on
her fist as she stared down at me thoughtfully. I ran my index

finger down the length of her scar.
"How did that happen?"
She shrugged. "Fight."

"I still don't know your name."

"Kami."

I smiled. A Icami was a spirit being of unusual power, from
the old Shinto myths. "My name's O'Toole. Arkady
O'Toole."

She nodded once.

"I'm sorry about your friend," I said.

She shrugged.

"You're not much for conversation, are you?"

She shook her head. Her gaze was so incredibly direct and

penetrating that I couldn't help looking away.

"I don't understand, Kami. Why me?"

"Don't know," she said. Then she reached across me and
pinched out the candle flame.

-TWO-

There's an old Japanese belief to the effect that if you save
somebody's life, you become responsible for it. No one in
modern Japan followed the old ways anymore, but Kami was
not exactly a modern Japanese. I'm not sure what the hell she
was, but after a few days, I started to think about staying there
with her.

It would have been a very foolish thing to do. My life expectancy
as a bushido bandit wouldn't have been much greater
than it was already and I was looking to increase it. Besides, I
couldn't really see myself decked out in lycras and studded
leather, zooming around the city on a hot scooter and terrorizing
the "zens." It would not have been an equal partnership. I
had nothing to contribute to her world and she had very little
to contribute to mine, but what little she had to contribute
would stay with me for a long time and as unselfconsciously--or
unconsciously--as she gave it, it was nevertheless something
to be valued.

She didn't ask anything at all of life, but within the narrow

29

30
	SIMON H^WKE

spectrum of the world she lived in, she took all it had to offer.
And if it didn't offer, she took it anyway. You could make a
lot of superficial observations about someone like Kami. You
could say that she was self-destructive, that she was irresponsible,
that she was a social misfit, that she was violent and immoral
and confused and all of those things would have been
true, at least to some extent, but they would nevertheless be
superficial observations.

Scan O'Toole had taught me, by example if not by words,
that people are rarely simple creatures. It's easy to make snap
judgments, stick on labels, make a decision based on that and
move on to the next thing. Lots of people do it and manage to
get through life and their various relationships more or less
okay, but they seldom learn much. Life is infinitely complicated
and people are a part of life.

Kami wasn't my true love and I sure wasn't hers, but there
was something there and that something wasn't merely lust. It
was a surprise for both of us. I watched Kami try to work her
way around it, fail to find a category that would conveniently
fit, and then just shrug and go with it. I admired her for that.

It wasn't that I was a great lover or that I overwhelmed her
with my terrific personality. I don't think the man's been born
who would be capable of overwhelming that young woman
with anything. She wasn't shogun of that bandit squadron for
nothing. No, what it was, I think, is that we were just two very
different people who, for some unfathomable reason, were
able to create something together that made us feel warm,
secure, and more of whatever it is we were in the first place. It
would be nice if that were enough. Many people make the
mistake of thinking that it is, but we've become too civilized
for such simplicity.

For the other bandits, who had given up trying to understand
life or were too busy burning it up to bother trying, our
relationship was not something to puzzle over greatly. I was
just something on a plate life had served up and Kami had
decided to sample it. Period. Acceptance. I was with Kami
until Kami decided I wasn't with her anymore and they would
figure out how to deal with that when it came around, if it
turned out to be something that required dealing with. For
Kami, it wasn't quite so simple and for me, it was even less so.

We didn't have anything in common except an intense emotional
attraction. The physical aspect of it was merely the

	PSYCHODROME
	31

catalyst. It was a fire that burned intensely when first lit and
then died down to a comfortable glow in which we both found
a very special warmth. We spent a lot of time basking in that
warmth, simply lying there together, bodies touching. She
didn't talk much and I talked a great deal, not only to fill the
silence, but because she listened and she didn't judge or comment.
She just accepted, with that characteristic shrug of
hers--a shrug that did not dismiss, but recognized with its own
peculiar eloquence that life was that way sometimes. She took
it all in with those hard, dark Asian eyes of hers, eyes that
always seemed to have little crosshairs in them. Except for
those special moments in that filthy corner back behind the
crates, when they would look at me with more affection than I
would have thought possible from such a wild creature.

I was with the bandits for five days. I didn't ride with them.
I preferred to stay behind and keep company with myself. I
had a lot of sorting out to do and I needed the time alone.

I wondered what might have happened if I were twenty-six
again, but I didn't wonder about that for very long, because it
was utterly pointless. I wouldn't have been the same person. I
wasn't even the same person who ran into Kami's scooter and
uttered a desperate plea for help. She had given it to me, no
questions asked and no conditions imposed, and it wasn't only
a matter of having saved my life. In her instinctive, inarticulate
way, she gave me a leg up, a leg up I needed badly. She
was exactly what I needed at exactly the right time and
somehow we knew that if we took it any further, it would sour
for both of us. Five days is only an eyeblink, but under the
right circumstances, a moment can seem like an eternity.

It was no great feat to recognize that I had made a mess of
things. It was pointless to regret anything that happened. The
cards were dealt and I had played them and it had been my
decision to sit down at the table. The game wasn't over yet,
but it was past time for a new deck.

Before I left, I cleared up a few final matters. I talked it over
with the bandits and after laughing like hell about it, they
decided it was a marvelous idea. I never would have dared to
contemplate anything like that before, but Saqqara was correct
in thinking me too dangerous now that I had nothing left
to lose. Kami had shown me how to hang it out over the edge
and just accept whatever happened.

It would have required major excavations of some labyrin-

	30
	SIMON HAWKE

spectrum of the world she lived in, she took all it had to offer.
And if it didn't offer, she took it anyway. You could make a
lot of superficial observations about someone like Kami. You
could say that she was self-destructive, that she was irresponsible,
that she was a social misfit, that she was violent and immoral
and confused and all of those things would have been
true, at least to some extent, but they would nevertheless be
superficial observations.

$ean O'Toole had taught me, by example if not by words,
that people are rarely simple creatures. It's easy to make snap
judgments, stick on labels, make a decision based on that and
move on to the next thing. Lots of people do it and manage to
get through life and their various relationships more or less
okay, but they seldom learn much. Life is infinitely complicated
and people are a part of life.

Kami wasn't my true love and I sure wasn't hers, but there
was something there and that something wasn't merely lust. It
was a surprise for both of us. I watched Kami try to work her
way around it, fail to find a category that would conveniently
fit, and then just shrug and go with it. I admired her for that.

It wasn't that I was a great lover or that I overwhelmed her
with my terrific personality. I don't think the man's been born
who would be capable of overwhelming that young woman
with anything. She wasn't shogun of that bandit squadron for
nothing. No, what it was, I think, is that we were just two very
different people who, for some unfathomable reason, were
able to create something together that made us feel warm,
secure, and more of whatever it is we were in the first place. It
would be nice if that were enough. Many people make the
mistake of thinking that it is, but we've become too civilized
for such simplicity.

For the other bandits, who had given up trying to understand
life or were too busy burning it up to bother trying, our
relationship was not something to puzzle over greatly. I was
just something on a plate life had served up and Kami had
decided to sample it. Period. Acceptance. I was with Kami
until Kami decided I wasn't with her anymore and they would
figure out how to deal with that when it came around, if it
turned out to be something that required dealing with. For
Kami, it wasn't quite so simple and for me, it was even less so.

We didn't have anything in common except an intense emotional
attraction. The physical aspect of it was merely the

	PSYCHODROME
	31

catalyst. It was a fire that burned intensely when first lit and
then died down to a comfortable glow in which we both found
a very special warmth. We spent a lot of time basking in that
warmth, simply lying there together, bodies touching. She
didn't talk much and I talked a great deal, not only to fill the
silence, but because she listened and she didn't judge or comment.
She just accepted, with that characteristic shrug of
hers--a shrug that did not dismiss, but recognized with its own
peculiar eloquence that life was that way sometimes. She took
it all in with those hard, dark Asian eyes of hers, eyes that
always seemed to have little crosshairs in them. Except for
those special moments in that filthy corner back behind the
crates, when they would look at me with more affection than I
would have thought possible from such a wild creature.

I was with the bandits for five days. I didn't ride with them.
I preferred to stay behind and keep company with myself. I
had a lot of sorting out to do and I needed the time alone.

I wondered what might have happened if I were twenty-six
again, but I didn't wonder about that for very long, because it
was utterly pointless. I wouldn't have been the same person. I
wasn't even the same person who ran into Kami's scooter and
uttered a desperate plea for help. She had given it to me, no
questions asked and no conditions imposed, and it wasn't only
a matter of having saved my life. In her instinctive, inarticulate
way, she gave me a leg up, a leg up I needed badly. She
was exactly what I needed at exactly the right time and
somehow we knew that if we took it any further, it would sour
for both of us. Five days is only an eyeblink, but under the
right circumstances, a moment can seem like an eternity.

It was no great feat to recognize that I had made a mess of
things. It was pointless to regret anything that happened. The
cards were dealt and I had played them and it had been my
decision to sit down at the table. The game wasn't over yet,
but it was past time for a new deck.

Before I left, I cleared up a few final matters. I talked it over
with the bandits and after laughing like hell about it, they
decided it was a marvelous idea. I never would have dared to
contemplate anything like that before, but Saqqara was correct
in thinking me too dangerous now that I had nothing left
to lose. Kami had shown me how to hang it out over the edge
and just accept whatever happened.

It would have required major excavations of some labyrin-

32
	SIMON HAWKE

thine corporate mazes to trace down the ownership of Saq-qara's
Ginza holdings and the trail would have led to me, not
to Saqqara. As the nominal controlling interest of Saqqara's
Ginza operations--his tame insurance policy against being
embarrassed now that he had risen to more reputable
heights--I had never actually controlled a thing, although
legally I was entitled to. It took some interesting maneuvering
and a lawyer with a kinky sense of theater, but I succeeded in
transferring my controlling interest to the bandits--as a corporate
entity. The thought of being a corporation sent them
into hysterics. I didn't think it would hurt Saqqara very much,
but it would hit him where he lived and, not coincidentally,
sever all ties I had with the Ginza. I never suspected what it
would lead to.

I had nowhere to go and no money to go there. And staying
in Tokyo would have been decidedly unhealthy. On the other
hand, Psychodrome owed me a grand prize.

It was both the longest and the shortest five days of my life.
At the end of it, I had only two days left in which to claim my
prize. The bandits gave me an escort to the shuttle and we said
brief good-byes. Kami never removed her helmet. I watched
them as they zoomed off until they were out of sight.

She never looked back.

Every now and then, Psychodrome ran a game round in
which a rank beginner, a lottery winner, was partnered with
several of the psych°superstars. The whole thing was a massive
multimedia public relations event in which the preparatory
stages to game initiation were broadcast and the
home audience got to follow the lucky winner through every
step of the initiation process in addition to the gaming round
itself. The idea was to stimulate sales in the lottery. The company
decided I was the perfect candidate for one of these ex-travanganzas.

I wasn't aware of the extent to which public curiosity had
built up around me. It was rare for a lottery winner not to contact
Psychodrome within hours, if not moments, of the announcement
of the prize. Five days had gone by without any
word from me. I had become something of a mystery man.

In most large cities, there are certain members of the news
media who specialize in covering crime. These people take
great pride in their contacts and their knowledge of the under-

	PSYCHODROME
	33

world. In Tokyo, however, and especially on the Ginza, things
didn't really work that way. On the Ginza, nobody, but
nobody, talked to reporters. The Yakuza was treated with the
same respect that ancient peasant farmers used to give the
samurai, and with good reason. A reporter's not going to yank
your heart out of your chest and show it to you before you die.

As a result, no one knew about my connection with Saqqara
and his Ginza holdings. Saqqara wanted to make sure it remained
that way. Ironically, so did I, in spite of the fact that
he had tried to have me killed. Psychodrome represented a
way out and I didn't want to give them any reason to disqualify
me. I'm sure Saqqara understood that, but he was not
the sort of man to leave loose ends lying around. I was a very
loose end. No one knew anything about me and no one had
any idea where I was, so speculation was running high. It
made for great news and great drama and the effect had not
been lost on Psychodrome. I had flashed them by screen to arrange
passage on the shuttle to New York and have somebody
meet me when I landed. I had no idea what a circus they'd
have waiting.

The first thing they had done was inform the media of my
arrival, so the reporters were out in force. The second thing
was to orchestrate a scene guaranteed to get me maximum exposure
and deny the reporters access to me as I got off the
shuttle. Their timing was perfect. They hustled me into the
limo just slowly enough to make sure there was sufficient
coverage, but too quickly and efficiently to allow anyone to
get close.

I hadn't expected it, so I was a little stunned. The first thing
that registered clearly was the guy sitting across from me in
back of the limo, telling me not to say anything to anybody
until they "had the angles right."

"You looked confused back there," he said, "that was
great. Just keep right on looking that way. 'What is all this?
What's happening to me? Why has my life suddenly been
turned all upside down?' It's perfect, perfect. That's just the
way we're going to play it, an ordinary guy overwhelmed by
an extraordinary event. We'll keep them on the hook until we
get the press conference straight and then we'll feed it to them
exactly the right way. Meanwhile, we keep them in suspense.
What's the story, anyway? Where were you for five days?"

I blinked at him. "I don't know," I said. "I'm all confused.

34
	SIMON HAWKE

I keep asking myself, what/s all this? What's happening to
me? Why has my life suddenly been turned all upside down?"
He stared at me. "You trying to be funny?"
"I'm only trying to be cooperative. Where are we going?" "To your hotel. The word is to lock you up tight until we're
ready to get the ball rolling. Arkaydee, old buddy, you've got
no idea what we've got set up for you!"
I was never fond of people who called me by my first name
when I didn't even know them and I liked it even less when
they mispronounced it. The way he said it, it rhymed with arcade,
and it doesn't. It's not "Ar-kay-dee," it's "Ar-kah-dee,"
with the accent on the second syllable. This character
had his accents wrong all over the place. He was wearing shiny
blue pants with a zoomy orange jacket, a diaphanous red scarf
draped around his neck just so, and he had one of those
geometric haircuts every young bandit in Tokyo was wearing
about three years earlier, which probably meant he was au
courant with New York style.
I had never been to New York, but I had met New Yorkers
on my home ground and the problem with New Yorkers is that
they never seem to realize they're not on their home ground
when they go somewhere else. That's unfortunate, because if
you fail to pick up your cues, people might think you're ill-mannered.
However, I was on their home ground now, so I
had to adjust my timing suitably.
"First of all," I said, "who are you?"
"Bob Stiers, Media Relations."
"Okay, Bob, now here's the way it is. Things have been
moving just a bit too fast for me lately. I'm feeling edgy and
tired and I haven't had a chance to absorb any of this yet, if
you know what I mean. I appreciate your meeting me and I
appreciate your getting me a room and I appreciate Psycho-drome
going to all this trouble, but right now, all I want to do
is get somewhere quiet, wash up, and shut my eyes for a few
hours. I'm not going to be much use to you or anybody else
until I've had a chance to do that, so if you don't mind, I'd
really like to hold the conversation for a while."
He stared at me for a moment, then gave a little snort and
shook his head. "Yeah. Yeah, sure, what the hell. First time in
the big city, right? You want a drink?"
"No thanks."
"You don't mind if I do?" The question might have been

	PSYCHODROME
	35

polite had the tone not been sarcastic.

"It's your party."

"Right. You might want to think about that."

I leaned back and closed my eyes. I was aware of his gaze
for several moments, then the awareness went away. I opened
one eye and saw him sitting sideways, talking to a screen with
the speaker switched off and the remote set's receiver up close
to his face, privacy shield hiding his mouth. I guessed the company
was being informed that I might be a little troublesome.

I didn't want to be particularly troublesome, but Bob Stiers,
Media Relations, had rubbed me the wrong way. I was tired of
being treated as a commodity. I had used those five days in
the Zone to think about who I was and what I had become and
where I was going. It's not easy to consider things like that
sometimes, especially if you're honest with yourself. I had
been about as honest with myself as I knew how to be and I
hadn't liked any of the answers very much.

Guilt can do savage things to you. It can tear you apart or it
can be a potent driving force. The trouble with guilt as a driving
force is that often you don't know what it is that's driving
you. You think you've got it all under control; you've shoved
the guilt back into a convenient dark little corner of your mind
and your iron will isn't going to let it get to you, but the subconscious
has a lot of leprechaun in it. It has a tendency to
wait until you least expect it, then open little trap doors in
your brain out of which spring nasty things that yell, "Surprise!''

In my case, what had leaped out was Sean O'Toole, all six-feet-six
and two hundred eighty pounds of him, saying,
"Fucked up again, huh?" We had a long talk, his shade and I.
We discussed the one thing I had always wanted to do more
than anything else and couldn't and that was to live up to him.
The trouble was, there wasn't enough of me to do that. Sean
had agreed in his amiable way and then he had said a most
unexpected thing. He asked me why I bothered.

He never said anything of the sort while he had been alive.
He was much too busy being Sean O'Toole. But as a ghost he
was much more amenable. I didn't start to stutter at the mere
thought of talking to him. He died about three years after I arrived
in Tokyo, never knowing what his baby boy had got
into, but it wasn't until we had our little conversation back inside
my brain that I stopped being intimidated by him. Time,

36
	SIMON HAWKE
experience, and the impenetrable veil had helped take care of
that. We had the sort of conversation I always wished we
could have had while he had been alive, but I had been too
young to know the right questions to ask and he had never had
the time for giving answers. In reanimating him inside the bandits'
warehouse, I suddenly saw him in a different light. I
understood his limitations and I thought I understood why he
had them. In his own way, the s.o.b, had loved me. But he
hadn't known how to go about it very well. He was a winner in
all the gam:s he played except the most important one.
I had finally become a winner too, and not only because I
won the lottery. I had won back myself, the self I gambled
away to Saqqara when I made up my mind to make a life for
myself and to succeed at it better than my father had, to grab
onto everything I could get my hands on and hold on at all
costs. It wasn't worth it. Nothing's worth losing yourself. I
wound up with nothing, but Kami helped me realize that
nothing wasn't such a bad thing to have if it was yours, free
and clear.
New York did not look all that much different from Tokyo
to me. It was more spread out, but it was just as huge, just as
dense, and just as congested. The tops of its towers were lost
in a murky gray haze and the jumble of interlacing streets
below made it impossible to see down to the lower levels,
which was probably just as well. The city looked older than
Tokyo and dirtier. The traffic was as thick, but it moved at a
slower pace. There were not as many scooters and the ones
there were behaved a lot more sensibly than their cousins in
Japan.
Generations earlier, some ancestors of mine arrived by boat
in New York Harbor and the first sight that greeted them was
the Statue of Liberty. It must have been a very moving experience
for them, just as the sight of the Bradbury Obelisk
must have been a moving experience for their descendents
generations later when they arrived on Mars. Miss Liberty no
longer looked out over the harbor. After she had been rebuilt
and refurbished several times at great expense, it was decided
to shield her from a hostile environment and she now lifted her
torch over the lobby of Liberty Towers, one of the city's more
exclusive neighborhoods, connected to Manhattan Island by a
multilevel causeway.
I learned this from a tourist tape Bob $tiers, Media Rela-

	PSYCHODROME
	37

tions, had punched up on the seL It provided a convenient excuse
for us to avoid having a conversation. Heaven forbid that
we should have to suffer silence! I pretended a mild interest in
the program until we reached our destination, the McDonald
Plaza Hotel. The limo skimmed beneath the massive golden
arches and there was a hotel shuttle waiting to whisk me away
to my suite before the reporters could close in.

"I wonder how they knew I'd be here?" I said. "I thought
the idea was to lock me up tight?"

Bob Stiers, Media Relations, gave me a funny look. "You
mean we're talking now? You're some kind of character, you
know that? Most people would give anything to be in your

position, but you, what, this is just another day?"

"You should see some of my days."

"Tell me about it," Stiers said. "I'd really like to know."
"So you could figure out how to sell me to the media?"
"It's my job. But I'd also like to know what sort of man
wins the Psychodrome lottery and acts like he couldn't care
less. You're really not impressed by any of this, are you?"

"I'm impressed by the serendipity of it all," I said as we
entered the suite. I looked around. "And I'm impressed by
this room."

Stiers took off his jacket and threw it down on a couch big
enough to sleep six. He had a matching orange shirt on

underneath. "Are you impressed by Stone Winters?"
"Who?"

He stared at me. "Oh, come on! You're putting me on."

"Oh, right, she's one of your top-rated psychos, isn't she? I
remember the name now."

"You remember the name? This is a joke, right?"

"How about putting it on hold while I try to find the shower
in this place? I haven't washed in several days and you've been
very diplomatic by not mentioning it."

"Christ, you really are a down-and-outer, aren't you?"
Stiers said. "You don't even own a psy-fi set, do you?"

I didn't own anything except the clothes on my back. Still, I
saw no reason to upset him by admitting that I used to own
one, but never used it. I shook my head.

"Well, no wonder!" Stiers said. "You really have no idea
what's happened to you, do you? You've never actually experienced
the game. Hell, this is perfect, perfect!"

He started waving his arms around, working himself up into

38
	SIMON HAWKE

some kind of public relations frenzy.

"Christ, I'm going to go to town with this! Here's a guy
who's sunk about as low as you can sink, struggling and
scratching for survival in one of the toughest, seediest places
on the entire planet, beaten down by life, nothing to look forward
to, not even a chance to escape his dreary existence for a
while with a fantasy because he doesn't even own a psy-fi set!
The man's got nothing, nothing, even his emotions have been
deadened, and he takes a desperate gamble, a long shot, the
only shot he's got to get out from under. He takes the last bit
of money he's got left and buys a chance in the lottery; odds
are a billion to one, no, a trillion to one against him and he
wins! And he doesn't even realize what it is he's won! All he
knows is that he's out of the garbage heap, somewhere where
he can breathe for once in his miserable life and just for that,
just for the chance to get out, he's willing to face whatever
comes! Christ, it's made to order!"

I shook my head with disbelief. "I gather you're pretty
good at your job," I said.

"Good?" he said. "Good? Arkaydee, old buddy, I'm the
best. By the time I'm finished with you, you're going to be the
hero of every down-and-out slob who can draw breath. You're
going to be their reason for existing! You're going to be every
man's role model, every woman's fantasy, the guy who clawed
his way out of the stinking lower levels of society where you
have to be a fucking animal just to survive and BAM!--fate
lands you right in the big time! Arkaydee O'Toole, the man
with nothing to lose and the universe to gain! Damn, the fucking
ratings are going to zoom!"

I left him to his ravings and went to take a shower. Ironically,
there was a lot of truth in what he said, but hearing it
from him that way made me feel particularly dirty.

I took a long, hot shower and stretched out on a giant, comfortable
bed. I had the door closed so I couldn't hear Bob
Stiers, Media Relations, as he cranked up his publicity machine.
It was a hell of a nice bed, but I found myself missing a
certain hard and filthy bedpad in a certain dark and filthy
warehouse back in the Combat Zone of Tokyo. I wondered
what Kami was doing, if she had found herself another lover
or if she had crashed and burned trying some insane maneuver
on her tiger-striped scooter. I had no idea that even as I was
lying there, she was performing an even more insane maneuver

	PSYCHODROME
	39

than anything I'd seen her do on her scooter, a move destined
to make certain Saqqara never forgot about me as long as I
lived.

I fell asleep at some point and dreamed about getting drunk
back on the Ginza and waking up in Junktown, only in the
dream, I woke up with Kami next to me. I told her that I blew
it, that there was nothing left, that we were stuck in Junktown
with no idea of where our next meal was going to come from.
She looked at me and shrugged and suddenly it didn't matter.

The next several days were a blitzkreig. Stiers was like a tur-bocharger;
the more energy he expended, the more power he
generated. I was briefed and prepped and groomed and polished.
Part of the process included getting a new wardrobe,
but I appeared at the press conference in a faded, well-worn
service uniform they found somewhere, one that made me
look appropriately down-and-outish. In accordance with Bob
Stiers's media plan, I was presented to the public as an ex-serviceman
from "the wild outback" of Mars who had fallen
on hard times. There wasn't a great deal of truth in the presentation,
but I suppose it didn't really matter.

Stiers and his staff then laid on a presentation that described
the gaming round I would participate in, teamed with Psycho-drome's
two hottest stars, Stone Winters and Rudiger Breck.
It was to be a sort of scavenger hunt composed of a number of
challenging scenarios designed by one of the game's most
celebrated playermasters, Tolliver Mondago. I had no idea
exactly how "challenging" those scenarios would be. Then
Winters and Breck were introduced.

I had never seen either of them before, but I knew something
about them from my talks with Stiers. Stone Winters
was a dazzler, a dark and sultry young heiress, a member of
the fast set for whom Psychodrome represented the fastest
ride around. She was already a celebrity when she started playing
Psychodrome, but, since turning full-time psycho, she had
become a major cult figure. She was twenty-nine years old,
smoky and vivacious, with a slightly raspy, whiskey baritone
voice and smoldering eyes that sent out waves of raw, unadulterated
sex. And she could turn it on and off like a flick of a
switch. Stiers didn't like her and I suspected the reason was he
had made a move and been shot down. He said she was "a
jaded rich bitch" who bought into sybaritic rounds of Psy-

40
	SIMON HAWKE

chodrome until some perverse impulse made her attempt a
high-risk scenario. Apparently, something clicked and she discovered
she was a thrill junkie, one of those people who thrive
on walking the blade edge.

"She'll melt your mind, Arkaydee," Stiers said, stubbornly
mispronouncing my name despite numerous corrections. "But
save yourself a lot of grief. I say this as a friend, okay? She's
cold. She doesn't need men. Christ, she can get any man she
wants, what can it mean to her? Her lover's Death, if you ask
me. She cockteases the fucker."

Breck was another kind of creature altogether. He was the
man home audiences loved to hate, the maverick who broke
all the rules--not that there were a lot of rules to break in
Psychodrome. His goal, said Stiers, was to accumulate enough
experience points and prize money to become a playermaster.

"He used to be an SS commando," Stiers said. "Lost his
right arm from the shoulder down and got a bionic replacement.
Designed it himself. It's an interesting piece of work.
He's a top-notch player, but he's a freak. You don't believe
me, check out his eyes."

I had the distinct impression Stiers didn't care much for any
of the players, which made me wonder why he was being so
solicitous of me. In Breck's case, he also seemed to have the
same prejudice a lot of people had against those who had been
bio-engineered. I didn't share it, but I could understand it.
Superior abilities can breed resentment. I did check out
Breck's eyes and what Stiers had been referring to had nothing
to do with bio-engineering. Breck was a bang smoker, a comparatively
rare vice on Earth because it was prohibitively expensive
and there was not a lot of call for it.

Smoking in public was against the law in most countries, a
holdover from the days when tobacco was still carcinogenic.
Before the tobacco companies all went out of business, they'd
been scrambling madly to develop a genetically engineered
strain of tobacco that was not a health hazard. They finally
succeeded, but by then smoking had become so socially unacceptable
that there was no real market for it. On some of the
colony worlds, the new strain of tobacco had taken hold and
some people smoked it, but on Caribbia, some enterprising
farmer had developed a hybrid of the mutated tobacco and a
local plant called bangalla. The result was a potent stimulant.
Smoking it had the effect of increasing adrenaline production,

	PSYCHODROME
	41

heightening visual acuity and tactile perceptions to an astonishing
degree. This made bang very popular for use in sex, but
it was highly addictive and there were serious problems
associated with having super-amplified senses. It had a curious
side effect which made it easy to spot an addict. Prolonged
and heavy use of bang did something funny to the eyes. It
made them glitter and become lambent like a cat's eyes when
the light hit them just right.

With the already striking aspect of Breck's ice-blue eyes,
the effect was unusually pronounced. He was tall and large
framed, very muscular, with Aryan blond hair and angular,
cruel-looking features. There was a cool, soft-spoken, clipped
Teutonic aloofness about him and he moved with the subtle,
hair-trigger manner of the born soldier. He was the sort of
man you couldn't help but notice in a crowd, without really
knowing why. I knew why. It was because he was a wolf
among the sheep.

While the cameras were on, it was all good camaraderie, but
the moment the press conference was over, the atmosphere became
a little strained. During the press conference: Stone
Winters had radiated an irresistible vivaciousness and sensuality.
Her smile was infectious and her humor earthy and
laced with double entendre, but later I saw what Stiers meant
when he told me she was cold. It was as if a shield had slid
down into place. She was totally indifferent to me. I think I
would have preferred an obvious dislike to such casual disregard.

Breck, on the other hand, seemed outgoing and friendly,
despite his predatory manner. It made me wonder why the
game's most celebrated bad guy was being so nice to me, taking
me under his wing and giving me friendly advice.

"So you were in the service," he said. "See any action?"

I shook my head. "The only action I saw was in boot camp.
I spent most of my hitch in the supply corps."

"Nothing to be ashamed of," he said. "The supply corps is
the backbone of the service. They were able to procure an arm
for me when I lost my own in the Belter Uprising." He held up

a normal-looking, black-gloved hand.

"Stiers said you designed it."

"This one, yes. I have since replaced the original prosthetic.
I found it inadequate to my needs."

"What do you think of Stiers?"

42
	SIMON HAWKE

"A loudmouthed, loutish bigot," Breck said. "He's never
played the game. He's the sort who dreams of accomplishing
great things, but lacks the courage to make the attempt, so he
resents all those who do. He's reached his level and there he
will remain, forever a secondary talent and a superficial human
being. He will act the part of your best friend and then
denigrate you when your back is turned. I find him altogether
too insignificant to bother with."

I smiled at the neat and dispassionate summation. "And
what about Stone Winters?"

He smiled back. "A work in progress."

"What does that mean?"

"It isn't easy to rearrange your priorities and world view at
her age, yet that is precisely what she's doing, and in a very
conscious, very deliberate way. The adventure scenarios have
changed her totally. I've seen the phenomenon before in combat.
A pampered, directionless young person who has never
had to struggle to achieve a thing suddenly finds meaning in
the highly charged atmosphere of combat. Life becomes pure,
reduced to bare essentials. Choices become simple and vital.
Stone is a young woman who's only recently discovered that
all her life, she has been nothing but a construct. She doesn't
give a damn about the voyeur/exhibitionist element of Psy-chodrome,
at least not anymore. She tunes it out. She needs
neither the money nor the fame. She needs the constant
challenge to help her find out who she is. She doesn't like me,

but I can respect her reasons."

"And they are?"

"Her reasons," Breck said. "If she chooses to share them
with you, that is her business."

I nodded. "And what do you think of me?"

"You seem a pleasant enough young man, but I am not enthusiastic
about being partnered with a newcomer. Tolliver
Mondago designs highly da.ngerous scenarios. He's tried to
kill me several times. He'll try to kill all three of us. It's something
that amuses him."

"I see," I said. "What are the odds of a newcomer surviving
his scenarios ?"

"Not very good," said Breck, as casually as if he were commenting
on the weather.

I shrugged. "Well, I'm a gambler. I like to bet long odds."

	PSYCHODROME
	43

He raised his eyebrows. "Indeed? And are you prepared to
lose?"

"No. I guess that means I'd better win."

Breck smiled. "Excuse me, but somehow you do not strike

me as a very successful gambler. What is your game?"
"Most anything, but I like poker best."

"You have the face for it. We shall have to play someday.
Do you play chess?"

"Yes, but not with you."

"And why not with me?"

"Because we may play poker someday."

Breck frowned. "I don't understand."

"A good chess player can tell a lot about how his opponent
thinks from the way he plays. You don't strike me as the sort
to go in for a 'friendly' game. You like to win. And, as I said,
I'm not prepared to lose."

Breck smiled again. "I may have underestimated you. This
may prove to be an interesting game."

"With partners who don't seem to like each other very
much," I said.

"Did I give you the impression I don't like you?" Breck
said. His voice took on a slight edge. "Or is it the other way
around, perhaps?"

I shook my head. "I'm not threatened by superior abilities,
Breck. I respect them. But I don't enjoy being sized up and
categorized. Maybe it's our fault, all those of us who were
born the old-fashioned way, but I've observed a certain attitude
of 'us and them' among genetic hybreeds. I don't like
being condescended to and I don't like being manipulated.
We've been teamed for this game and you've already decided
I'm a handicap. Now you're trying to get a fix on how much
of a handicap. I suppose I can understand that, but I don't
have to like it."

Breck grinned. "Well done, O'Toole. I've been properly
chastised. But it occurs to me that I'm not the only one who's
been 'sizing up and categorizing.' If it will make you feel any
better, or any more secure, I'll authorize access to my psychological
database for you. Cards on the table, as you gamblers
say."

"Meaning, of course, that I'll have to reciprocate with access
to my own file once it's been compiled, is that it?"

44
	SIMON HAWKE

"You would object?"

"Yes, I would. But you already knew that, which was why
you made the offer. I think I'd prefer to have that game of
poker. But only if you wear short sleeves."

Breck chuckled and put a hand on my shoulder, giving it a
friendly squeeze. He used his natural hand, but the strength of
his grip could have fooled me. "I like you, O'Toole. You are
refreshingly free of artifice. Unfortunately, you may find that
a hindrance in this game."

It was the last chance I had to speak with him before game
initiation. After the press conference, I was taken back to my
hotel room, where I changed and packed the new clothes the
company had been kind enough to buy for me, and then began
the coverage of the lottery winner's preparation for the game.
I had time to myself only when I slept and went to the bathroom.

We left the hotel and took a limo to the corporation headquarters
in midtown Manhattan. I completed all the necessary
paperwork, shook hands with the appropriate dignitaries,
taped a pitch for the lottery--"It happened to me, it can happen
to you!"--and then it was back to the limo and off to
Brooklyn, to the Downstate Medical Center, for the medical
and psychological stages of game preparation. The physical
was routine, but exhaustive, and I was pronounced healthy, in
excellent condition. Then followed hours of conversations
with psychiatrists, several batteries of tests, and more talks
with the shrinks.

I've always had my doubts about psychiatry. I had gone
through similar sessions during my enlistment processing,
though none quite so exhaustive, so it wasn't entirely new. The
thing about psychiatrists that bothers me is that they never
turn it off. Analysis becomes like a disease with them and one
of the symptoms that it manifests is the belief that they know
all about people. As I said, I have my doubts. I suspect they
know all about certain mechanistic processes and linkages that
have to do with various neuroses and conditions, much as doctors
recognize diseases by their symptoms, but that's a far cry
from knowing the works of the human mind so well that you
can reduce them to some sort of comprehensive schema. Yet I
have never met a shrink who did not, at least in some respect,
pretend to a sort of godlike omniscience.

Having the ability to understand people is not the same as

	PSYCHODROME
	45

knowing what makes them tick. The first requires empathy.
The second requires a very deep and intimate knowledge of
another human being and you can't achieve that without risking
involvement. And I sure as hell don't believe you can
achieve it through scoring a test. Nevertheless, those test
scores and evaluations of my sessions were all going into a
confidential file, a database for access only by company physicians
and playermasters, a dossier that purported to be "me,"
reduced to bare essentials. I told them what I thought of that
and that went into the file, too.

Surgery came next. Needless to say, I didn't remember anything
about it except going to sleep in the operating theater
and waking up after it was over, bald and with a bandage on
my head. The truly interesting part came when I learned how
to use the biochip.

Actually, there wasn't much to learn, as it did not really require
my doing anything. It merely required my getting used to
it. The programmers started with fairly simple procedures,
such as transmitting images to my mind which I was then
asked to identify and describe in detail. Then the procedure
was reversed, with me sitting in another room at a table piled
with various objects, looking at them and handling them to see
how well the reception worked. It apparently worked fine.
Then we proceeded to telepathic communication and I found
it both fascinating and somewhat disquieting to "hear" voices
in my mind. I was informed that my reactions were excellent,
as was my "adaptability quotient," whatever that was. It
seems it was not unusual for people to lose their cool completely
when strange voices started speaking in their brains.
The most amazing and, to me, most pleasurable part of the
procedure was the computer interface. It was like a form of
sleep learning.

I was given a mild sedative and made comfortable on a
reclining couch. This was also to be a test of tachyon broadcast
and reception, though on an extremely short range. I was
asked if I had any preference of learning programs for test
transmission purposes and I selected something I had always
wanted to learn. I fell asleep and woke up after a nap of about
two hours, feeling relaxed, refreshed, and possessing a fluent
knowledge of the Russian language. Now I could converse
with my archbishops in their native tongue.

To me, this was worth everything I had gone through, in-

46
	SIMON HAWKE

cluding almost getting killed. I found that I could take a ten
minute nap during computer interface and wake up having
"read" all of War and Peace. I could interface with the computer
and "study" engineering or world history or foreign
languages. I could take half-hour "courses" in combat
weaponry and wake up an expert on the subject. The purpose
of the computer interface learning programs was to prepare
me for the various game scenarios of Psychodrome, but so
long as I played the game, I would have the option of buying
time on the computer for my own use between the game
scenarios. It wasn't cheap and having a biochip implanted on
my own would have cost a fortune, but it was worth it. And I
realized that so long as I would have that opportunity, I would
make full use of it. My only disappointment came on learning
that I could not simply interface indiscriminately. There was
danger of what they called "cerebral overload." Too much of
a good thing, I suppose. The mind needed time to recuperate
and assimilate. Without that time, there was serious risk of
psychosis. And my access time would be limited by psych tests
to determine my "assimilation quotient." Everything seemed
to be a "quotient" or a "factor." Accumulating knowledge, I
was told, could be highly addictive and it was "necessary to
protect people from knowing too much." I let that straight
line pass to avoid having my rejoinder go into my file. I was
learning.

On the last day of my preparation, my playermaster came to
visit me. Tolliver Mondago was an old man with a somber,
sepulchral voice and deeply set, penetrating dark eyes. He was
tall and gaunt, with large, heavily veined hands and a long,
mournful-looking face, deeply etched by age. I thought of
Marley's ghost without the chains. He sat down beside my
bed--I was required to rest for at least six hours after inter-face--and
looked down at me with a fatherly indulgence.

"How are you feeling?" he said, after introducing himself.
All sorts of associations sprang to mind upon hearing that
deep, tomblike voice. Coleridge's Ancient Mariner. The ghost

of Hamlet's father. Oedipus Rex tearing out his eyes.
"F-fine, Mr. Mondago. And yourself?"

"Well, thank you. I wanted to give you the chance to grow
accustomed to my voice, so that it will not disorient you when
I establish contact during the game. Are you nervous?"

"No, I don't think so."

	PSYCHODROME
	47

"Good. Better to take things as they come. Have you any
questions?"

"I guess I'd like to know what to expect."

"Expect the challenge of your lifetime, Mr. O'Toole."

"I was hoping for a somewhat more explicit answer," I
said.

Mondago smiled. "Very well. Your first scenario will involve
jungle combat. And that is all I will tell you for the moment.''
He stood and turned to leave, then hesitated and
reached into his pocket. "Oh, I almost forgot. This message
arrived for you this morning. Since you were indisposed, I
took the liberty of signing for it."

I took the message. It consisted only of two words: "You're
dead."

There was nothing to reveal who sent it, but I had an excellent
idea. I glanced up at Mondago, but could not read his
impassive, woebegone expression.

"Good luck, Mr. O'Toole," he said.

-THREE-

It took us barely two weeks to secure the first objective of our
gaming round. I had been convinced it would take much
longer. A combat decoration was a mark of status among mercenaries,
usually awarded only for extraordinary courage
under fire or action resulting in saving fellow soldiers' lives. I
had succeeded in doing both, no thanks to my own courage or
to Breck's assistance.

I was furious with him, but, fortunately, it took some time
for the shock to wear off and for me to be able to stand up on
my own without falling down. It was fortunate because if I
had been able to stand up immediately after the action, I
would've taken a swing at him and that would have been a
very foolish thing to do. I'd have had as much chance against
Breck in a fight as a three-year-old would have had against
me.

It was an interesting two weeks, to say the least. It gave me
an appreciation of just how easy my hitch in the supply corps
had been. I had never seen ground combat during my stint in

48

	PSYCHODROME
	49

the service. During those two weeks in the jungle with the CDI
mercenaries, I saw it every day. I came to appreciate both the
complexities of limited corporate warfare and the unwritten
rules of camaraderie among combat soldiers--and, perhaps
not coincidentally, among Psychodrome professionals.

Corporate mercenaries did not have an easy time of it. In
some respects, I suppose it was better for them than for
soldiers of the past. Wearing combat armor could hardly be
described as pleasant, yet it was a considerable improvement
over having to slog through the jungle without it. The bugs
would have eaten us alive, in some cases literally. Pesticides of
any sort were out of the question, as were defoliants, because
a comprehensive ecological profile of the planet had not yet
been compiled and no one wanted to risk damaging the real
estate. Weapons which would have shortened the conflict
drastically were prohibited by treaties and the inhospitable environment
rendered it necessary to preserve existing facilities
wherever and whenever possible. Consequently, the conflict
was reduced to a deadly game of touch-and-go between the
forces of the rival multinationals and chances were it would
continue until some sort of compromise was reached inside a
boardroom or until one or the other decided further involvement
wasn't cost-effective.

For the mercenaries, it was a day-to-day existence and there
was absolutely nothing in it for them but the money. For
some, perhaps, there was the thrill of combat, but there was
not much glory to be had in fighting for a piece of rock that
would belong to someone else. They had no patriotic or
idealistic motives and they could not derive support from the
knowledge that people back home were pulling for them,
because nobody back home really cared. In a few cases, some
had wives and families who prayed for their safe return. These
were usually the desperate individuals who went in for corporate
combat as a last resort and, pathetically, they were all
too often among the first to die. The hardcore professionals
had learned long ago that they could not hold on to wives or
families. They were corporate mercenaries because it was all
they knew. It was what they did best and they usually didn't
do anything else very well at all. Most of them would serve
their hitch and, if they survived, go somewhere to unwind, get
drunk, drugged out, and fucked blind until their money was
all gone and then they'd start looking for another war

50
	SIMON HAWKE

somewhere. It was a life, after a fashion. A lonely life in some
respects and not a very noble one, perhaps, but it was all they
had.

Their social relationships could be best described as idiosyncratic,
but they seemed to fall into one of two general patterns.
There were those who functioned on the basis of a sort of
fatalistic, "what the hell, we're here today and gone tomorrow''
camaraderie, which pattern Breck seemed to fall into
quite easily, and then there were those who were standoffish,
as if they were waiting to see if you could prove something to
them, such as your ability to cope and to survive. When I
began to understand that, I thought I began to understand
Stone Winters.

She was the consummate chameleon, extremely skilled at
reading people and situations so that she could find the perfect
niche to fill. With the mercenaries, the role she chose to play
was that of iceberg, the iron maiden who was just as hard as
any of them. There were not many female mercenaries and she
was the only woman in our group. What's more, she was a
celebrity, which was both an advantage and a drawback. Having
Breck there was a help, because he was a man they all
respected, but she quickly made it plain that she could hold
her own. Someone as stunningly attractive as she was had to
have learned to handle men at a very early age, but unlike
many beautiful women, she did not do it through manipula-tion-although
I had seen how well she could play that game
when the situation called for it. She did it by meeting them on
their own level. Yet I couldn't help but feel that it was all an
acting job--a skillful and realistic one, but a performance just
the same. Method acting. While she was doing it, it was real to
her and that was what she became, but the real Stone Winters,
whoever that was, remained elusive, inaccessible behind a lot
of walls and bridges. "A work in progress," Breck had said. It
was an insightful comment. It made me wonder exactly how
well they knew each other, It also made me just a little jealous.

I had the feeling that Breck knew her a lot better than either
of them would admit and I found myself thinking about her a
great deal. There was, of course, the obvious physical attraction,
an inevitable consequence of her beauty and the baser instincts
of my sex, but there was also the attraction generated
by my own ancestral mix--the Irish weakness for romantic
mystery and the Russian tendency toward introspection. I

	PSYCHODROME
	51

wanted to peel back the layers and find the personality within.

I was sufficiently recovered from the battle after a few days
and we took a jump ship back to Earth. The game required us
to touch base with headquarters after each scenario, at which
time we would receive orientation for the next stage of the
gaming round. There were a number of reasons for doing it
this way. The rules called for us to take a specified period of
"hiatus" determined by the playermaster, during which we
could relax on our own time or make public appearances if the
company scheduled any, while the playermaster reviewed our
performance in the previous scenario and made any necessary
preparations or modifications for the next. It was also necessary
to go back between scenarios because the next scenario
could be a hallucinact in which we would, unknowingly, never
leave the corporate headquarters.

The hallucinact worried me the most of all. On one hand,
I'd be physically safe under a programmed hallucination at
game headquarters, but I was worried about what sort of
nightmare Mondago might devise. I was anxious to avoid it. I
could, of course, drop out of the game at any time between
scenarios--because once a scenario was under way, it was too
late for second thoughts--but that would constitute a forfeit
and I would only be entitled to the bonus money my experience
points had earned. For a lot of players, that was plenty,
especially after experiencing a high-risk scenario, but with
Saqqara on my tail, dropping out of the game would not offer
much security. Still, I had hopes we could cut some kind of
deal, hopes which were promptly dashed when I made that call
to him the day we returned. It was Saqqara who told me what
my last defiant gesture against him had amounted to.

I had thought that by pulling my paper shuffle and transferring
my proprietary interests in his operations to the bandits, I
would force him to negotiate with them to get those rights
back, thereby getting them some money as a way of paying
them back for their help. However, it seemed Kami had something
else in mind.

On the day after they dropped me off at the shuttleport, the
bandits paid a visit to the Pyramid Club and trashed it thoroughly.
Saqqara had been furious and had summoned the
police. The bandits were still there when the police arrived and
they had all submitted to arrest without resistance, much to
the surprise of the police. The reason became apparent quickly

52
	SIMON HAWKE

when their lawyer pointed out a pertinent fact or two. The
bandits could hardly be charged with trespassing or with
destruction of property when that property belonged to them.
Too late, Saqqara realized how he had left himself wide
open, but there was nothing he could do. He made a try at
salvaging the situation and offered substantial sums of money
to the bandits for the return of the controlling interest in his
properties. I had expected that. Saqqara was a man who knew
when to cut his losses. What I had not expected was Kami's
refusal to sell.., at any price. Instead, she offered to buy him out and, adding insult to injury, made an offer so ridiculously
low that Saqqara would have been humiliated by accepting it.
Nor would she back off. Unknowingly, I had touched off a
spark that erupted into gang war--the Yakuza versus the
bushido bandits--and the bandit squadrons who had fought
amongst themselves for years were now uniting to stomp a
common enemy. The news reports confirmed it. The Ginza
Strip had turned into a war zone. The Yakuza was not very
happy with Saqqara and he had me to thank for it. It almost
made me wish I had stayed in the jungle with the mercenaries.
I needed time and money and, most of all, I needed distance
from Saqqara. That meant seeing the game through to the
end. It made my Russian archbishops very happy. Now they
had something to be depressed about. I never left my suite in
the hotel. I was afraid to. But also there was something I had
to know, something I could only learn by doing a thing I really
didn't want to do. I went back and forth about it for a while,
but I finally succumbed, plugged in, and punched up a rerun
of our combat scenario. Only this time I experienced it as
Rudy Breck.
Curiously, it was different this time. Not the scenario, but
the plugging in. Having already been there, I found myself
reacting differently to the situation. I wasn't focused on the
vicarious experience itself, but on Breck's relation to it. I was
quite literally tuning him in, not just his activities. It wasn't
the experience of jungle combat I was seeking, but the experience
of being Breck. It was, perhaps, a subtle difference,
but it was an important one. I don't think I could have done it
if I hadn't been there. The sensory input would have been too
distracting.
When it was over, I understood why Rudy Breck was such a
star. To the average person who tuned in, the experience itself

	PSYCHODROME
	53

would be the overwhelming factor, but Breck's perceptions of
it would be the guiding influence behind the psychodroid's
vicarious fantasy. He would enable fans to be something for a
while that they could never be themselves. Most of it, I realized,
would be subliminal. They'd never consciously realize
what specific factors were involved--his security of ego, his
self-centeredness, his sense of natural superiority, and, at least
from my perceptions, his apparent total lack of fear. I realized
that some highly creative editing was done at Psychodrome,
but I didn't think that even they could be that subtle. Breck
was quite literally a swashbuckler, a personality throwback to
another age. If that was a result of the way his genes were engineered,
I could see why the commandos of the Special Service
existed in so ratified an atmosphere. Danger was not so
much a thrill as it was a game, not to be taken very seriously.
While I had been experiencing my emotions at peak levels,
Breck was merely playing. A very adult form of play, to be
sure, but play nevertheless. It occurred to me that the most
emotionally mouselike fan could tune him in and get a taste, if
only for a little while, of what it felt like to have power in his
world. And if that was what Psychodrome could do, then I
had overlooked its potentially therapeutic value by considering
only its more superficial aspects and I may have misjudged
it, as I had misjudged Breck.

That night, Mondago appeared to me in a dream. In the
dream, I woke up in my bedroom, not knowing why I had
awakened. I sat up in bed. The room was dark. There was a
knock at my door.

The door opened, but there was no one there. Then-a
silvery, luminous fog started to roll in through the open doorway.
Through the billowing mist came Mondago, walking
slowly, looking like a specler from beyond, dressed all in black
with the gleaming blood ruby amulet of the playermaster worn
around his neck on a gold chain.

"Congratulations," he said. "Your team is the first to complete
the requirements of the combat scenario. The next stage
of the gaming round will take you to Draconis 9. Orientation
program broadcast will commence at O-six hundred hours.
Your objective for this next scenario will be to secure a fire
crystal gem and bring it back with you. Good luck."

I woke up. The room was dark. I sat up in bed, feeling a
strange sense of dji vu. It was two o'clock in the morning

54
	SIMON HAWKE

and someone was knocking on my door. I got out of bed,

threw on a robe, and went to the door.
"Who is it?"
"Stone."

I opened the door. She was standing barefoot in the hall,
dressed only in a long black silk robe.

She smiled and walked in as I closed the door behind her.

"You were asleep?" she said.

"I was."

"Then you dreamed him. I suppose it was something dramatic.''

She sat down in an armchair, leaned back and crossed her
legs. They were very long and very lovely legs. It was a hell of
a distracting sight.

"I guess you could call it dramatic. You had the same
dream?"

She shook her head. "I was awake, waiting for it. I don't
like him in my dreams."

"Can I get you anything?" I said. "A drink? Some coffee?''

She shook her head. "What did you do tonight?"
"Nothing much. Relaxed. Took a bath..."

"You plugged in to watch a rerun, didn't you?" she said.

I was embarrassed to admit I had. "I hadn't wanted to," I

said, "but I found myself unable to resist. I had to know."
She nodded.

"I misjudged him," I said. "His jets really did malfunction.
I think I owe Rudy an apology."

A strange look came over her face. "You tuned in Breck?
Was that the only reason you plugged in? To find out if Rudy
set us up?"

"I'm not proud to admit it, but yes. Why?"

She was silent for a moment. "They don't broadcast everything,
you know."

"Well, sure, of course they have to edit. But I don't--"

"How do you know Rudy didn't sabotage his jets before the
battle?"

I stared at her. "Would he really.., no." I shook my head.
"I was tuned in to him. I would've known if he knew--"

"Not necessarily," she said. "It isn't actually complete telepathy.
It's more of an empathic interface. And when you've

	PSYCHODROME
	55

been a psycho long enough, you learn how to block what you
don't want coming through. For Breck, it would be easy. He
has superior powers of concentration. Greater mental discipline.''

"Still, that doesn't mean he did it."

She shook her head. "No, it doesn't. But don't be too quick
to apologize. Breck wants to win and he doesn't much care
how he does it. He can be quite compelling in his way, but
everything he does is motivated by self-interest. If you don't
believe me, ask him. He'll admit it. He's an unusual man."
She paused. "But that isn't what I came to talk to you about."
She looked down, then looked up at me again. "You didn't

tune me in?"

"No."

"Weren't you even tempted to?"
"No. Not with you."
"Really?"

"You don't believe me?"

She shook her head. "No, I do believe you. And maybe I
know why." She licked her lips. "I plugged in to a rerun, too.

I tuned you in."

"I see."

"That makes you uncomfortable," she said.

"Maybe it shouldn't, considering how many other people

were doing the same thing, but yes, I guess it does."

"I think maybe I will take that drink," she said.

"Name your poison," I said. "The bar's pretty well stocked
here."

"Vodka. Neat."

I went to the bar to pour the drink.

"When you're teamed with someone,'' she said, "it's
almost impossible to resist the temptation of tuning in a rerun
of your last scenario to experience it from your teammate's
point of view."

"I guess I can understand that," I said, my back to her.

"I know I haven't exactly been very friendly toward you,"
she said.

I turned around and almost dropped the drink. Her robe
was completely open.

"I'd like to make it up to you," she said, her husky voice
even huskier than usual.

56
	SIMON HAWKE

I started to ask her why and found my voice cracking, so I
had to clear my throat and start again. "Why?"

She didn't move from the armchair. She simply sat there,
staring at me darkly, her lush body exposed and framed by
folds of black silk.

She smiled. "Because you have a very sexy mind."

"I'm serious."

"So am I," she said, getting up and coming toward me, losing
the robe along the way.

I shoved the drink at her. She took it and tossed it back in
one swallow, then dropped the glass on the carpet and put her
hands on my chest, sliding them to the lapels of my robe,
pushing them back and pulling the robe off my shoulders. I

gently but firmly pushed her away.

"Stone... please."

"What's wrong?" she looked puzzled, suddenly unsure of
her ground.

"What's wrong is that I've just used up the last bit of willpower
I had left and I'd really like to know why this is happening
before I let it happen."

She backed off. "Oh." She sighed. "I guess i picked the
wrong approach, huh? I thought maybe if I made it easy for
you, we could.., oh, the hell with it. Can we start again?"

She bent down and picked up the glass. "How about a refill?"
"Only if you put your robe back on."

She gave me another, even more deadly, smile, handed me
the glass, and went back to the chair to get her robe. And then
the door burst into splinters and a body came flying backwards
into the room.

He was dressed all in black, with a hood and mask covering
his face so that only his eyes were showing. He rolled as he hit
the floor and I heard Breck yell, "Get down, O'Toole.t'' and
then I was on the floor as Stone hit me with a flying tackle.

Something whirred over my head with a buzzing sound and
thunked into the wall behind me. I saw the black-garbed body
flying across the room, feet extended, to deliver a devastating
kick to Breck's chest and send him staggering back to smash
into the wall. Breck blocked the next three kicks which came
like a blur in almost one motion, trapped his opponent's foot
on the last attempt, and flipped him backwards. The assassin
back-somersaulted and landed on his feet. Breck's glove was

	PSYCHODROME
	57

off and he held his nysteel hand in front of him, fingers rigid
and spread wide apart. There was a pneumatic hissing sort of
sound and five razor-sharp, six-inch blades slid like stilettos
out of the ends of his fingers.

The assassin saw them too late. Breck laid his face open as if
it had gone through an egg slicer. The man screamed, involuntarily
bringing his hands up to his face. Breck finished it by
plunging all five blades deep into his chest and giving a savage
twist. The scream was cut off abruptly.

B. reck used his normal arm to push the dead body off his
knife-edged fingers and it crumpled to the floor. Blood
dripped from the five blades, which made me think insanely of
the long fingernails of some ancient Chinese mandarin.

"Good evening, O'Toole. Have you got a towel?" said
Breck, holding up his dripping blade-edged hand. He looked
down at the two of us, Stone stark naked, still on top of me.
"Oh, I beg your pardon. Am I interrupting anything?"

"Lord, Rudy, you're sick, you know that?" Stone said, getting
up and belting her robe around her.

"Never mind, I'll get it myself," said Breck, going into the
bathroom. From inside the bathroom, he said, "Stone, you'd
better call the police. And then--"

We all heard it in our minds at the same time. Mondago's
voice coming through the interface. "The police are already
on their way. All three of you please stay where you are. Stiers
is en route. He'll handle this."

"Mondago, if you broadcast any of this, I'll sue the company
for invasion of privacy," said Stone. "We were on our
own time."

"I quite understand, Miss Winters," said Mondago. "You
need have no concerns on that account. I would advise you to
be circumspect with the police until Stiers arrives."

Breck came out of the bathroom, wiping his knives on a
towel. He looked down at the corpse. "I've heard of ninjas,
but this is the first time I have encountered one. Before the
police arrive, O'Toole, do you have anything you'd like to tell
me?"

He dropped the towel and looked down at his hand. I didn't
see him do anything, but there was a soft hissing and chunking
noise as the blades retracted quickly one by one somewhere
into the front part of his forearm. He flexed his gleaming

58
	SIMON HAWKE
nysteel fingers. There was some ioise out in the hall and
people were looking in through the doorway. There was no
longer any door to shut.
"On second thought, perhaps we'd better wait for any explanations,''
Breck said.
"All right, nobody move?
Several policemen came into the room, their pistols drawn.
"You three, get your hands up and leave them there."
The policeman who spoke walked over to the corpse and
looked down at it while the others kept us covered. He gave
a low whistle. "What the hell kind of weapon made that
wound?"
"If your men will avoid overreacting, I will show you,"
Breck said.
"Okay. Let's see it, nice and easy."
Still holding up his hands, Breck snikked out his blades.
The policeman's eyes grew wide. "Sweet Mother of God,"
he said. He swallowed hard. "Put 'em back."
Breck retracted the knives.
"What the hell are you, some kind of cyborg?"
"Wait a minute, Lieutenant," one of the other policemen
said. "I know this guy. That's Rudy Breck, the Psychodrome
star."
The lieutenant looked at Breck again, then at Stone and me.
He nodded. "I thought you looked familiar. Okay, you can
put your hands down. What happened here?"
"Breck, don't answer that!"
Stiers pushed his way into the room. There was another man
with him, a white-haired, very well dressed older man.
"Hold it!" the lieutenant said. "Who the hell are you?"
"Bob Stiers, Psychodrome Media Relations, and this is our
attorney, Delevan Smith. These people aren't answering any
questions without benefit of legal counsel."
The lieutenant nodded. "I'm well acquainted with Mr.
Smith's reputation," he said. "You don't waste any time, do
yOU?"
An officer came in out of the hall. "Lieutenant, I think
you'd better take a look at this. I found it outside in the
hallway."
He held out a zip gun, wrapped in a handkerchief.
"It belonged to the perpetrator," Breck said. "I managed
to disarm him in the hallway."

	PSYCHODROME
	59

"That will do, Mr. Breck," said Smith. "Lieutenant, are
my clients being charged with anything?"

The lieutenant sighed. "Why me? Why on my shift? Mr.
Smith, at the moment, we're just attempting to ascertain what
happened here. I'd like to proceed with that, if you have no
objection. No one's being charged with anything, except
possibly a concealed weapons charge against Mr. Breck here."

"My weapons are registered. I have a permit to go armed,"
said Breck, smirking.

"Cute," said the lieutenant. "We'll check on that, if it's all
the same to you."

"Lieutenant, may I have a moment to confer with my
clients in private?" Smith said.

"No, Mr. Smith, you may not. No one has been formally
charged here; You are, of course, entitled to be present and to
advise your clients. Now could we please get on with this?"

Smith nodded and sat down in an armchair. The lieutenant
beckoned us to the couch, then turned and pointed to Stiers.

"You, I don't have to put up with. Out."

"Now just a minute--"

"Go ahead, Bob," Smith said, "I'll handle this."

Stiers left, but he didn't look happy about it.

"Now," said the lieutenant, "my name is Lieutenant Wil-kerson.
Mr. Breck and Miss Winters, I already know." He

looked at me. "You are?"
"Arkady O'Toole."
"The lottery winner?"
I nodded.

"Whose room is this?"

"Mine," I said.

"You want to tell me what happened?"

"I'm sorry, Lieutenant Wilkerson," said Smith, "but
would you mind asking specific questions?"

Wilkerson gave Smith an irritated look. "Right, counselor.
Mr. O'Toole, were you alone in here or were any of these
people present in the room with you at the time of the occurrence?''

"I was here," said Stone.
"Mr. Breck?"
"No," I said.

"I see. Were you awake?"

"I'm sorry, Lieutenant," said Smith, "that's immaterial."

60
	SIMON HAWKE

"For Christ's sake, Smith--"

"We were talking," I said. "About to have a drink."
Smith glanced at me and shrugged.

"Mr. Breck, where were you at this time?"

"I was on my way down from my own room to join them,"
said Breck. "I wanted to discuss some aspects of our next
game scenario."

"I see. And you encountered the alleged perpetrator in the
hallway?"

"He was in the process of climbing through the window at
the far end of the hall when I got off the lift," said Breck.

Wilkerson frowned. "Are you suggesting he climbed up a
sheer wall to the thirty-fifth floor?"

"You'll find where he cut through the window," Breck
said. "The man was a ninja."

"Locker, check the window," Wilkerson said to one of the
other policemen. "What the hell is a ninja?"

"A genetically engineered and bio-modified professional
assassin," Breck said. "An autopsy of the deceased will bear
me out."

"What happened when you saw him coming through the
window?"

"He threw down on me," said Breck.

"Could you be more specific?"

"He attempted to shoot me with his pistol. The one the

other officer found out in the hallway."
"And did he, in fact, fire?"
"Three times," said Breck.

Wilkerson raised his eyebrows. "Three times? And this pro-

fessional assassin missed you all three times?"
"I took evasive action," said Breck.
"What does that mean?"
"I ducked."

"Do you expect me to believe that--"

"Lieutenant, I believe my client has already answered that
question," Smith said. "Mr. Breck is a former officer in the
Special Service. He possesses physical reactions at least three
times as fast as those of ordinary people."

"Yes, I was aware of that," said Wilkerson, "but, really!"
"Is that a question, Lieutenant?" said Smith.

"Okay, okay," said Wilkerson. "So he fired at you and
missed. What happened then?"

	PSYCHODROME
	61

"We grappled," Breck said.

"Where was this, specifically?"

"Approximately halfway between the lift tube and the
hallway window," Breck said,

"That was when you disarmed him of the weapon?"
Wilkerson said.

"That's correct. He was pretty good. Strong. Very quick."
"How did he wind up inside this room?"

"He crashed through the door when I threw him off me,"
Breck said.

"And you pursued him in here?"

"That's correct. I knew this was O'Toole's room and I was
afraid he might be hurt.''

"And that was when you.., produced your weapon?"
"Ninjas are walking lethal weapons, Lieutenant. You don't
want to take any chances with them. He had already fired at
me several times and he threw a buzz disk at me. You'll find it
embedded in the wall there. I wasn't about to give him a
chance to produce another weapon. I expect you will find a
few on his body."

"You've encountered these ninjas before?"

"No, but I had heard about them. In the SS, we always used

to wonder if they were as good as we were."

"And are they?"

"I'm alive. He's dead."

Wilkerson nodded. "Why do you think such an unusual
professional assassin would be after you, Mr. O'Toole?"

Smith jumped in quickly. "Excuse me, Lieutenant, but
there is nothing to indicate that Mr. O'Toole was this
assassin's target. Breck encountered him coming through the
window and was attacked. The assassin happened to be
thrown through Mr. O'Toole's door during the struggle. His
target could have been anyone on this floor, or even someone
on another floor to which the assassin intended to have access
by means of this one."

"And I suppose it's just a coincidence that Mr. O'Toole is
from Japan and the assassin was a ninja?" said Wilkerson.

"I thought you didn't know what a ninja was, Lieutenant,"
said Breck.

Smith interrupted. "As it happens, Mr. O'Toole is not from
Japan, he is from Mars. Bradbury City, to be specific. It's true
he spent some time in Japan, but you will find the same is true

62
	SIMON HAWKE

for a lot of servicemen. It appears to me that what we have
here is a case of breaking and entering, assault with a deadly
weapon, and attempted murder. Mr. Breck surprised the
perpetrator and was attacked. He merely acted in self-defense
and, considering his attacker, he did not employ excessive
force. It appears to me that this situation has been amply
clarified. My clients were merely innocent bystanders and Mr.
Breck probably foiled an assassination attempt against someone
in this hotel."

Wilkerson gave Smith a long look. "I see your reputation is
well deserved, counselor. I trust your clients will remain
available for further questioning?"

"My clients are show business personalities whose work frequently
takes them out of the country and off-planet," Smith
said. "I see no reasonable grounds to enjoin them against pursuing
their careers. If you have any further questions at any
time, my office will be at your disposal. Now, if you don't
mind, I'm sure my clients would like to recover from this
ordeal."

Wilkerson gave us all a long look. "Right," he said.
"You'll have to make arrangements with the hotel for another

suite, Mr. O'Toole. I'm afraid we have work to do in here."
"He can stay with me tonight," said Breck.

"Okay, no further questions. Mr. O'Toole, you can return
in the morning to pick up your possessions. I'll post an officer
outside, meanwhile. Counselor . . . it's been educational.
Good night."

Stiers was waiting for us outside. "What in God's name
happened?" he said.

"Mr. Breck, do you mind if we use your room for a few

moments?" Smith said.

"Not at all."

We took the lift tube up one floor to Breck's suite.

"The hotel's not going to be happy about this," said Stiers.
"I need to tell them something."

"Thank you, Bob, we're all fine," said Stone. "Nobody
was hurt. We appreciate your concern."

"Back off, Stone," said Stiers. "I can see you're all fine
and I'm glad no one was hurt, but I've got to know how to
handle this thing."

"It should be fairly simple, Bob," Smith said. "The hotel
should be grateful to Mr. Breck for surprising a professional

	PSYCHODROME
	63

assassin and foiling an assassination attempt against one of
their guests. Needless to say, we don't know who the ninja's
target was. Considering what the luxury suites in this hotel
cost, I'm certain there are any number of likely possibilities in
residence, although I would caution you against making any
literal suggestions as to who that target may have been.

However, just between us, what really did happen?"
"Exactly what I told the police," said Breck.

"So we really don't know if one of you three was the intended
target?" Smith said.

I was about to say something, but saw Breck shake his head
minutely.

"Well, it's not my job to speculate about that," Smith said.
"Bob, I think we're finished here. We can discuss what you
tell the press tomorrow while you take me home. I'd like to get
some sleep."

Stone waited until they left, then said, "Mondago, are you
tuned in?"

There was no response. At least not in my mind.

"Mondago!" she said again. "Mondago, damn it, I want to
talk to you right now!"

This time, he replied. He sounded--or rather, felt--a little
tired. "Yes, Miss Winters?"

"Why didn't you answer the first time?" she said out loud.

"Because I had gone back to sleep, Miss Winters. It is the
middle of the night, you know."

"The police were awful quick arriving," she said. "So were
Stiers and Smith. Why is that, I wonder?"

"I was not eavesdropping on your private time, if that is
what concerns you," Mondago's voice came through. I
wondered if he was actually speaking or just thinking it. "My
computer alerted me that Breclc's bio-readings indicated
physical combat and I interfaced immediately, perceived what
was happening, and made the necessary calls. I am pleased
they were so prompt. The moment the situation was in hand, I
disengaged and went back to sleep. The computer woke me
when it registered that you wished to interface. Now was there
any other purpose for this contact or may I go back to sleep?"

"If I find out you're turning me in while I'm on my own
time, Mondago, you'll be one sorry son of a bitch," she said.

"Really, Miss Winters, after ali this time, do you honestly
thinlc I need to interface with you clandestinely for some

64
	SIMON HAWKE

vicarious entertainment? What would be the point? Besides, if
that was what I wished, I could merely punch up a rerun of
any one of dozens of your old lust channel experiences. I
understand some of them were quite exotic. However, if you
must know, I prefer to find my entertainment in a good book. I find that sufficiently stimulating. Now, if you don't mind, I
am going back to sleep. We will reschedule your orientation
session for noon tomorrow. I will adjust the required hiatus
period for the other teams so that you will not lose the advantage
you have earned. Good night."
I felt embarrassed for her. Or perhaps I felt embarrassed for
myself; I wasn't sure exactly which. There was no need for all
three of us to have been interfaced--Mondago could just as
easily have interfaced with her in private. In the brief moment
of silence that followed, a lot was said, though never stated.
And we didn't need an interface.
"I need a drink," said Stone.
"It's quite late," said Breck, "but at the moment, I'm feeling
a bit keyed up. Understandable under the circumstances, I
should think. Anyway, I feel the need to dispose of some excess
energy, otherwise I shall never get to sleep. I will be back
in about an hour, O'Toole, if you are still awake and feel like
talking. You realize, of course, the ninja was after you. I came
upon him drawing his pistol directly outside your door. Had I
been a moment later, I would have been deprived of both my
teammates. I wonder if Mondago would have considered that
a forfeit?"
Stone watched him from behind the bar as he left, then
looked at me and raised her glass. "That was his rather
clumsy, heavy-handed way of giving us some privacy," she
said. "As if privacy was something we could ever really have.
You want a drink?"
"No, thank you. I don't drink very well, so it's probably
best that I don't drink at all."
"I drink very well, indeed," she said, tossing back a healthy
slug of booze and refilling her glass. "Well. The evening
didn't go exactly as I planned."
"You want to talk about it?"
"Do I want to talk about it? You almost got killed tonight
and you're asking me if I want to talk about it?"
"You were there, too," I reminded her. "If Breck hadn't
shown up, you would have been killed as well. It would have

	PSYCHODROME
	65

been my fault. I thought, under the circumstances, you might
not feel much like talking to me right now."
"Aren't we something?" she said. "We allow everyone to
use our minds and bodies, yet look how awkward we are
around each other."
"Maybe that's why," I said.
"Why does somebody want to kill you, Arkady?"
"It's a long story."
She tossed back another drink. "Tell me later," she said.
"Do you really want to sleep here tonight?"
"I find it a little hard to believe you'd want to pick up where
we left off after what's happened."
"Especially after what's happened," she said.
"Wouldn't I make you feel a little vulnerable?"
I'll tell you a secret, O'Toole," she said. "I always feel
vulnerable. We don't have to do anything if you don't want
to. I just want to be with you tonight. God damn it, I know you're attracted to me. I'm not used to throwing myself at
men. Why are you putting me through this? Is it because of
what Mondago said?"
I shook my head. "No, it isn't. And you're right, I am attracted
to you. Very much so. I know my reasons, obviously.
However, your reasons aren't obvious to me at all. Maybe it's
peculiar, but I'd like to know what they are."
She downed another drink. She looked down when she
spoke, avoiding my gaze. "That's one of them," she said.
"Because you need a reason. Because my body turns you on,
but that's not enough for you. You don't think with your
cock. I know I'm being crude, but that's how most men are."
She looked up at me with a very strange, intense expression.
"I know you don't like the game," she said, "but you're exactly
the sort of person who should play it. I play it because it
gives me something; I don't know exactly what it is, but it
helps me feel alive. I guess a lot of that comes through and
it makes the fans feel alive as well. Maybe that's why I'm so
popular. But you.., you bring something very different to it.
I felt it the moment I tuned you in. Those of us who play the
game get more out of it when we tune into another Player. We ·.. fixate more strongly. I picked up on a lot of what you felt
about me. I suppose a lot of other people probably did too,
but that doesn't bother me. Do you know why? Because you
think about things in a special sort of way and because you

66
	SIMON HAWKE

feel about people and a lot of that comes through the interface.
It makes for pretty strong stuff. You're a very emotional
man, Arkady. People need to feel about things the way you
do. People need to care. And for once in my damn life, I'd like
to be with a man who really cares. I don't know what it's
like."

I exhaled heavily. "Wow. And to think somebody told me
you were cold." Now I couldn't meet her gaze. "I... I really
don't know what to say."

"Well, for God's sake, say something," she said.

I took a deep breath and let it out slowly, knowing that no
matter what I said, it would probably come out sounding
foolish. "Are you sure it was me you were tuned into?" I
winced. "I'm sorry, that was a pretty stupid thing to say. I
guess I'm not handling this very well."

She came around from behind the bar and stood very close
to me, forcing me to look at her. "There's no need to feel embarrassed,''
she said softly. "Don't you realize that, in a way,
you've already made love to me?"

She was so close that there was nothing else to do but kiss
her. And it was just the right response. And she wasn't cold at
all.

"It's late," she whispered. "Let's go to bed."

-FOUR-

It's hard to deal with the fact that you've got some powerful
feelings about someone when you know those feelings have
been broadcast to several billion people. I don't know why I
hadn't expected that, but even if I had, what could I have done
about it? I guess that was what Stone meant about us not ever
having any real privacy. We could have private moments on
our own time, which made it that much more valuable, but we
were public figures--public minds--and knowing that made
me feel I'd never really know privacy again. It made me feel a
tremendous sense of loss. It also made me feel self-conscious.

"It doesn't matter," Stone said, lying naked next to me.
"For God's sake, somebody just tried to kill you. That could
tend to put a damper on romance. But don't worry, you're
safe with me. I'll protect you." She reached beneath her
pillow and pulled out a plasma pistol. She saw the expression
on my face and stopped smiling. "Look, will you stop worrying
about it? I told you, it really doesn't matter. There's more

67

SIMON HAWKE
to two people caring about each other than simply sex. At least
that's what I hear."
"I didn't mean that," I said. "I'm a bit upset about it, but
my ego isn't on the line here. I know exactly why it happened.
On the other hand, maybe my ego/s on the line. Maybe it isn't
even my ego anymore. But I have the feeling that as we're
lying here, several billion people are looking in."
"They damn well better not be or the company's going to
have a hell of a lawsuit on its hands for accessing our personal
time," said Stone.
"I didn't mean literally," I said.
"I know," she said. She took a deep breath and !et it out in
a sigh. "I suppose making jokes about it isn't going to help
much." She sat up in bed and pulled her legs up under her.
"So we talk. What the hell, I wasn't feeling sleepy anyway."
I bunched the pillow up behind me and propped myself up.
"It really doesn't bother you?"
"Silly question," she said. "Remember who you're talking
to? I used to be queen of the lust channels."
"I know. I guess I don't understand."
"There isn't all that much to understand," she said, resting
her chin on her knees and hugging them to her. "My family's
fabulously wealthy and I've always had everything I ever
wanted. They didn't believe in saying no because it would have
meant explaining why and they didn't really care anyway. It
was a lot easier to simply say yes. I took up less time that way.
I grew up knowing I could have anything I wanted, do anything
I wanted, and so I wanted more and more. There was no
such thing as enough. Everything came easy and nothing
meant very much. Especially sex. So I looked for a way to
have it mean something."
"Isn't that what they call love?" I said.
"Yoh really are a romantic, aren't you?" she said. "Listen,
love is love and sex is sex. I suppose they're kind of nice
together, but you can have love without sex and you sure as
hell can have sex without love. I didn't know what love was,
but I knew all about sex. When you have a lot of money and
you look the way I do, it's an easy education to come by. I
learned early. I was precocious. But as soon as the novelty
wore off, so did the thrill. At first, I thought it was just a matter
of finding someone who knew how to push the right buttons.
Then I started thinking there might be something wrong

	PSYCHODROME
	69

with my buttons. And finally I decided that maybe I was one
of those people whose buttons needed a real hard push,.you
know? So if one won't do the trick, try two. If two won't do
it, try three. Only it can get a little tiring if you keep escalating
things that way. With Psychodrome, I discovered that by buying
into lust scenarios, I could have a billion people all at once,
without having to deal with the sweaty reality of all those
bodies. It was a real ego thing. I was turning on all those
people..."

"And turning yourself off," I said.

She nodded. "I didn't have much of a self-image to begin
with. Being a mindfuck didn't improve it any. It got so I
didn't know who the hell I was anymore. It wasn't until some-

one suggested I try one of the high-risk scenarios--"

I took a wild stab. "Breck?"

She glanced at me with surprise. "Yes, actually, it was
Rudy." She pursed her lips. "He told you?"

"No. It was just a guess. I had a feeling there was something
between you two once. He said you didn't like him, but that he
could respect your reasons. He said it was up to you if you
wanted to tell me what they were."

She made a wry face. "That sounds like Rudy all right."
She thought a moment, then shook her head. "I'd rather not

talk about it." She looked at me. "Does that bother you?"
"Yes, but I think I can live with it. You're entitled."
"Boy, you aren't even the least bit insecure, are you?"
"Don't kid yourself. Of course I'm insecure. Most everybody
is in one way or another. I try not to expect more of anybody
else than I'd expect of myself. Too many people get
involved and then try to rip each other's brains to pieces,
wanting to find out everything at once. It's like you and the
sex thing. Nothing means much if it's easy. Quality takes a
little time."

She smiled. "Where were you when I was fourteen?"

"I think I was dating older women."

"And I was fucking older men. Sounds like we're made for
each other. Want to get marriedT"

I raised my eyebrows. "Aren't you rushing this a littleT"

She took on a mock serious look. "Oh, no. By all means,
take your time. I wouldn't want you to be easy."

"You're in serious danger of being belted with a pillow."
"Don't forget," she said, "I've got a gun."

70
	SIMON HAWKE

She leaned forward and kissed me. "Don't let this throw
you, but I'm not entirely sure I was only kidding. I'm joking
about it because it makes me nervous, but, at the same time, it
really doesn't bother me that you broadcast all those feelings
about me. They were good feelings about me, not just my
body. About wanting to know me, about wanting to understand
how I feel and think about things. Most people keep a
tight rein on their emotions, especially me. Half the time, I'm
not even sure what they are. Maybe I'm burned out in some
ways. But you don't hold back at all. You have no idea how
sexy that can be. That interface with you was very powerful. I
can't help but wonder how people will react to that. If they
react anything like I did, you're going to be very popular with
the female audience." She grinned. "Maybe I should snap you
up before somebody else does."

"I'd say you have the inside track," I said.

"You know, all kidding aside, I think I could get very
serious about you," she said. "Could be I already am, but I'm
honestly not sure. Something happened when I tuned you in.
Maybe the interface made me fall in love with you, but I don't
know if this is really love. I'd hate to think it was and then find
out it was only some kind of self-gratifying reaction to being
me experiencing you thinking about me. It would be unfair to
you if this was no more than an ego thing on my part. I've had

a lousy track record and I don't trust my instincts."
"I think I can trust mine," I said.
"And what are they telling you?"

"They're telling me not to expect more than you can give.
And you're not even sure how much that is. You don't seem to
have had much experience with giving. It sounds as if you've
been a taker all your life. I don't mean this to be unkind,
Stone, but I don't think you know how to lay down all the
cards."

"You may be right," she said. She kissed me and burrowed
into my shoulder. "But you may not be right for long. This
could turn into something really special."

"Why don't we just leave it at that?" I said.

"Why don't we," she said. She turned out the light.

Breck knew where I had spent the night, but nothing in his
speech or his demeanor alluded to it in the slightest. If he was
a bastard, he was at least a gentlemanly one. Or maybe he just

	PSYCHODROME
	71

didn't care. Even after I had tuned him in, he remained
elusive, difficult to read. Unlike somebody else I knew real
well. If he was curious about Stone and me, he didn't show it.
He was much more curious about the attempt on my life the
preceeding night. We took a limo from the hotel to corporate
headquarters and had a late breakfast in the executives'
lounge, where I told him why a former down-and-outer had a
ninja try to kill him. Stone already knew. I had told her the
night before.

"What I can't understand is Mondago's reaction to it all," I
said. "Or maybe I should say his lack of reaction."

"Simple," Breck said. "Mondago knew there was a contract
out on you. That message you received--he must have
tracked it down and found out it came from Tokyo. The rest

he most likely got from you."

"From me?"

"It's the logical assumption," Breck said. "Mondago is the
oldest and by far the most experienced playermaster. He used
the biochip to probe your memories."

"But I thought that was illegal!" I said.

"So what?" said Breck. "Can you prove he did it? You're
still fairly new at this, O'Toole. Someone with my knowledge
and experience would detect a memory probe and be able to
guard against it, at least to some extent. But with someone as
experienced as Tolliver Mondago, you probably didn't even
realize it was happening. Besides, some people are better
broadcasters than others, more naturally empathic. You might
think of it as the psionic equivalent of wearing your heart on
your sleeve."

Stone gave me a sidelong look.

"You're saying he knew about it and did nothing?" I said.
Breck shrugged. "What could he do? Admitting he knew
would be tantamount to admitting he had probed your mind.
You'd have lawyers coming out of your ears, eager to sue
Psychodrome on your behalf and retire on the contingency
fee. Besides, why should he do anything about it? Suppose
that ninja had succeeded in terminating you. It would have
been a hell of a news story and the company would have

owned the exclusive broadcast rights. Think of the publicity."
"Some company we work for."

"No better and no worse than any other," Breck said.
"You can always count on people to look out for their own in-

72
	SIMON HAWKE

terests first. Why should corporations be any different? However,
that is beside the point. The question is what to do about
your current situation. Ninjas are the highest priced assassins
in the world, but if your friend Saqqara is a warlord of the
Yakuza, he can afford to throw them at you by the dozens.
Calling him from the hotel was stupid. That was how he located
you. Next time, and I think we can safely assume that
there will be a next time, he may well send more than just one
ninja. I would not be anxious to face two or three of them.
Besides, I have no intention of becoming your bodyguard for
the rest of your life."

"I had no intention of asking you to," I said. "I wouldn't
expect you to jeopardize your life for mine. The trouble is, I
don't see what can be done. Sooner or later, they're bound to
get me."

"Oh, that's just great," said Stone. "That's a terrific attitude.
Give up without a fight."

"He's right," said Breck. "There's no real defense against
assassination. If you're a target, eventually someone has to hit
you. But that doesn't mean giving up without a fight. There is
a virtually limitless supply of assassins if the price is right.
However, in this case, there is only one contractor. Your only
option is to kill Salqara before he kills you."

"You expect me to try killing a warlord of the Yakuza?" I
said.

"I don't expect you to do anything," Breck said. "What
you do or do not do is entirely your business. I am merely
pointing out what seems to be your only possible alternative to
getting killed. Assuming, of course, that you survive the next
scenario."

I sighed. "So if Psychodrome doesn't kill me, Saqqara will.
Ain't life just wonderful?"

"I find it preferable to death," said Breck. "Either way,
there is nothing you can do until the next scenario has been
completed. Unless, of course, you choose to drop out of the
game. Compared to what we can expect on Draconis 9, our
last scenario was like a holiday at a beach resort."

"What can we expect on Draconis 9?" I said. "After a hitch
in the supply corps, you'd think I'd know. Seems to me I've
heard the name, but I'm drawing a blank. Where is it?"

"It's a small planet in the system of 61 Cygni," said Breck.

	PSYCHODROME
	73

"It was the ninth new planetary body discovered by Florescu
Draconis during the last century, hence its name. It had an atmosphere
capable of supporting human life, though it was on
the thin side, similar to what you might find at the highest
elevations of the Andes. Preliminary probe reports indicated
that with only minimum modifications to its ecosystem, Dra-conis
9 could comfortably support a human colony. The
EuroCon consortium undertook development, but they gave
up and wrote it off after suffering substantial losses. After
their experience, no one was anxious to attempt colonial de-veloIment
and Draconis 9 has essentially remained undeveloped
real estate ever since."

"Why?" said Stone. "What happened?"

"A rather serious error in judgment," Breck said. "There
was already a sentient race on Draconis 9, only no one no-riced.
They didn't notice because the Draconians did not fit
any of the established criteria for sentience. They did not construct
shelters or use tools, for example, but most important,
they were not even remotely humanoid. We--meaning
humans--mistook them for animals. And by the time we realized
our error, it was too late. The contamination was irreversible.''

"What kind of contamination?" I said.

"The worst kind there is," said Breck wryly. "The contamination
of human arrogance and conceit. We contaminated
them."

He finished off his coffee, lit up a bang stick, and sig-naied
for another cup. "The Draconians are a race of ambi-morphs."

"Good God.*" I said. "Shapechangers. Now I remember
where I heard the name."

Breck nodded, inhaling the pungent bang smoke deeply.
"What the EuroCon people mistakenly thought were herds
of animals were actually primitive tribes. Primitive by our
standards, at any rate, and Draconis 9 proved quite an education
in the fallacy of applying our standards to extraterrestrial
life forms. They looked like animals, they lived like animals,
they behaved like animals, ergo, they were animals. And since
they were animals and reasonably numerous, it seemed equally
reasonable to consider them a potential food source. The
people of the development team hunted them, cooked them,

74
	SIMON I-IAWKE

and ate them. Apparently, they were quite tasty. Supposedly,
the taste was not very unlike beef, though quite tough and a
little on the gamey side--"

"Rudy, for God's sake," Stone said.

Breck shrugged. "However much we may have evolved,"
he said, "we are and always have been a predatory species. We
tend to export our baser instincts along with our more noble
ones. Something the Draconians evidently didn't understand."
·

He took a long pull on the bang stick and held the smoke a
moment. His eyes were beginning to shine. "The particular
mammalian form they apparently chose most often was useful
to them until a predator that was not intimidated by it arrived.
Humans, in other words. Humans confused them. The Dra-conians
are telepathic. Or perhaps empathic would be the
more accurate term, since they do not send. Their method of
communication is to read each other's minds. They read the
minds of the humans and realized they were sentient beings
who--at the outset, at least--meant them no harm. They also
realized that the humans were curious about them, so they
tried to accommodate them by remaining in the shape the
humans were so curious about and being accessible. It must
have been quite a shock to them when these harmless new arrivals
experienced a change in attitude and decided to try adding
them to their diet.

"Their sentience was a very different form of sentience
from anything we're used to," Breck continued. "They
seemed a very placid, peaceful sort of creature, accommodating
and not terribly curious. Well, they didn't seem
curious, but in fact they were learning about humans all the
time. Being shapechangers, they were also highly imitative.
Perhaps shapechanging was a defensive response and they
didn't do it in the absence of an overt threat. No one knows
for certain. There are still a lot of unanswered questions about
the Draconians, but once they learned to fear humans, their
instinct for self-preservation lead them to imitate humans.
They not only learned to imitate human shape, but, being em-paths,
they began to think like humans, too. They incorporated
what they learned about us into their own experience and
essentially mutated.

"At first, the EuroCon people were puzzled by the disappearance
of the herds, but soon after that, there was a great

	PSYCHODROME
	75

deal more to puzzle them. The Draconians began to infiltrate
the EuroCon development team. Being able to read human
thoughts made it easy for them. A Draconian could duplicate
your shape, your voice, your mannerisms and memories and
be virtually indistinguishable from you. So how do you tell the
original from the imposter?"

"How did they tell?" said Stone.

Breck shrugged. '"They didn't. That is, they couldn't, so the
Special Service was called in. I was very young then and it was
one of my first combat assignments. Mondago knows that, of
course. I'm sure that's why he selected this particular scenario.
It isn't one of my more pleasant memories. We were able to
avoid being infiltrated by wearing transceivers with coded
signals that the shapechangers couldn't duplicate. But that did
not assist us in telling the humans who were already there from
the Draconians. We killed a large number of Draconians, but
we also killed many of the humans by mistake. There was no
way of telling because the Draconians did not automatically
revert to their natural form upon death. They seem able to
alter their molecular structure somehow, to literally become
the life forms they are imitating."

He stared into his cffee for a long moment, his eyes glittering
like strobe lights. "There was talk of wiping them out
completely, but there didn't seem to be any way of doing it
short of severely damaging the planet with strategic weapons.
How do you fight creatures that can assume any shape in their
environment? Besides, there was also the moral question to
consider. Did we have the right to commit genocide upon a
sentient race that, because of us, had become more like us? So
Draconis 9 was written off and the surviving members of the
EuroCon development team were left behind. Marooned."

"You mean you just left them there?" said Stone. "Several
thousand people?"

"How would we know whom we were taking back with
us?" Breck said. "Orders were quite specific on that point. No
shapechangers were to leave Draconis 9 under any circumstances.
A quarantine of sorts was imposed. The service maintains
a base in orbit above Draconis 9. The base personnel are
all SS, for a number of very good reasons. A number of independent
concerns have since taken over the habitats EuroCon
originally established for the terraforming of Draconis 9.
These habitats are all governed by the military base." He

76
	SIMON HAWKE

grimaced. "Governed is, in this case, a somewhat loose term.
The authority of the SS in the 61 Cygni sector is absolute, but
they're chiefly concerned with maintaining the quarantine and
in that, their measures are.., well, draconian, if you will excuse
the pun. As to what happens on the habitats themselves,
they're not terribly concerned. Humans are allowed to visit the
surface of Draconis 9, but they do so at their own risk, the risk
being that they may never get off the planet again if their
humanity cannot be proved. Assuming they survive down
there in the first place--human contamination has made the
Draconians a great deal less placid and peaceful than they
were originally."

"Who the hell would want to go there?" Stone said.
"Crystal hunters," Breck said.
"Fire crystals?" said Stone.

Breck nodded. "The rarest and most treasured gems in the
known universe. They are impossible to synthesize and a flawless
one is worth a king's ransom."

"I know," she said. "My mother had one. I knew they
came from one of the outsystem worlds, but I never knew
which one. I always wanted one for myself, but it's the one
thing they wouldn't give me."

"I doubt that even your family could have afforded more
than one," Breck said. "They are found only on Draconis 9
and very few of them ever make it all the way to Earth.
They're usually snapped up by bidders in the colonies and the
ones that do make it increase in value exponentially. The habitats
around Draconis Base are populated by crystal hunters
and those who cater to their needs. If you can imagine the
Barataria Bay pirate colony or the opal mining camps of the
Australian outback in the nineteenth century, you'll have
some idea of what life is like out there. Now that's where you
have the animals, not down on Draconis. I'll tell you something,
O'Toole, whether you have ninjas sniffing at your heels
earthside or shapechangers and homicidal crystal hunters to
deal with on Draconis 9, it's six of one or a half dozen of the
other. Except there is a possibility of earning prize money on
Draconis."

"Assuming we actually go to Draconis 9," I said. "The next
scenario could be a hallucinact."

"What makes you think so?" Breck said.

"Well, the expense, for one thing," I said. "I mean, send-

	PSYCHODROME
	77

lng us all the way to 61 Cygni--"

"Considering what the ratings are likely to be, it would be
well worth the expense," said Breck. "Besides, sponsors bear
a large part of the costs. The company could also negotiate a
contract with one of the larger multinationals that has precious
mineral commodities as one of its diverse interests."

"Of course," I said. "They receive the fire crystal if we
bring it back and get a corporate deduction for investment and
advertising expenses. And if we fail to bring the gem back,
they can take advantage of the extraterrestrial speculative
capital exemption and write off a loss."

"That's right," said Breck. "I had forgotten you were a
broker once."

"But it could still be a hallucinact," I said.

"It could be," said Breck, "but I suggest you try to forget
all about hallucinacts. The way to get through a hallucinact is
to convince yourself it's real. Psychos cannot afford to doubt
the reality of their perceptions."

I tried to follow Breck's advice, but the first thing I thought
of when I woke up from orientation was that I might still be
asleep. Well, not exactly asleep, but not exactly awake, either.
I had never experienced a hallucinact, but I knew that while a
hallucinact was in progress, I would be conscious.., well,
maybe not exactly conscious, because I wouldn't be conscious
of my actual surroundings or perceptions, but I would be conscious
of the reality dictated by the hallucinact . . . well,
maybe not exactly reality, more like subjective reality, reinforced
by interface with Breck and Stone and interaction with
other people involved in the hallucinact.., well, maybe not
exactly people, although some of them would be real, actually
real, as opposed to subjectively real, except I wouldn't be conscious
of their objective reality, only of their subjective reality
as dictated by the haltucinact.

I know. I didn't understand it, either.

But then Breck explained it to me in a way that made all the
technical jargon clear to the layman. If you wake up from it, it
was an illusion. If you don't, it wasn't. I thought I could follow
that.

It didn't seem like an illusion, but then that was the entire
point. For all I knew, they had used our biochips to "keep us
under," as they so quaintly called it, and loaded us onto a

78
	SIMON HAWKE

jump ship. On the other hand, maybe we were still "under." I
had been preoccupied with much the same thoughts at the
beginning of the first scenario, but once the fighting started, I
didn't dwell a great deal on whether it was real or not. Your
senses are all you have to go on and what they tell you is real is
easily accepted as being real. Sensory deprivation can lead to
insanity. So can sensory overstimulation. Whether your senses
are being fed too much information or too little, it's impossible
to ignore them. But what Breck had told me kept coming
back to haunt me.
People who reject reality and construct their own are usually
considered schizophrenic. Yet even mentally healthy
people engage in vicarious denial of reality. People confronted
with unfortunate situations have been known to respond with,
"This can't be happening to me!" And how many otherwise perfectly normal people routinely practice actual reality
denial, as in denying the reality of situations resulting from
various personal problems? Could I really expect myself to be
infallible? Could my mind, confronted with an unacceptable
reality, resist the temptation to seek safety in denial?
In combat, with plasma rockets exploding all around me, a LITTLE voice in the back of my head had started reassuring me.
Maybe it's not real, it said. Maybe you're really safe and this is
all a psychodream. I managed to silence that little voice before
it got me into trouble, but would I still be able to silence it if I
was confronted with beings who could assume any shape at
will? Beings who would be capable of reading my mind and
finding out my secret terrors and becoming them? If it was a
hallucinact, that voice saying "This can't be happening to
me!" would be the voice of sanity. But if it wasn't a halluci-nact,
it could be the voice of doom.
I might be better off taking my chances with Saqqara. Only
it was too late for second thoughts. Dream or reality, I was in
the middle of it.
The way to get through a hallucinact is to convince yourself
it's real, Breck had said. Well, so far, that didn't seem particularly
difficult. The ship seemed real enough, the crew
seemed real, even the latrine--or the head, as they called it on
a ship, for some reason which totally escaped me--was in need
of some deodorizing. Had I been this nervous on the first time
out? Nervous, hell, had I been this scared? No, I hadn't been,
because.., well, because at that stage, it hadn't yet been

	PSYCHODROME
	79
"real" for me. I realized that if I didn't stop this line of
thought soon, this scenario could become a major problem.
It was, from our standpoint, a very short trip. In fact, if it
weren't for the slightly disorienting effects of "downtime," it
would have seemed as if we had gone under for orientation
programming and come out of it on board the ship scarcely a
restful night's sleep later. Only we were already making the
approach to Draconis Base, so we had been down for a considerably
longer time than that. It was more cost-effective that
way.
Downtime was a sort of biorhythmically controlled, cybernetic
yogic trance state. Not quite the coldsleep of short-term
cryogenics, but Close. And for the regular passengers, of
which there were none on this flight--you couldn't exactly call
outbound crystal hunters and SS commandos "regular" pas-sengers-short-term
cryogenics was merely a no-frills option.
They could, if they chose, remain awake during the entire
voyage and enjoy it as a sort of luxury cruise, but that was
considerably more expensive and only the very well-heeled
with time on their hands took advantage of it. First Class accommodations
were, as a result, extremely limited. Passengers
who traveled Coach--another term which made absolutely no
sense to me--were far less cumbersome.
It was hard to believe that only in the last century, space
flight was a long-duration ordeal, done entirely under long-term
coldsleep. Tachyon technology, or, as the media
newspoke it, "Tach Hi-tech" (THE for short, as in Marietta-Hughes THE on the Big Board), had changed all that. It was
the legendary "warp drive" of the classics come to life,, only
far less dramatic in reality. Unlike the FTL drives of "science
fiction" writers, as the precursors of the modern neoclassicists
were called, the tachyon drive "jump" was a very unglam0r-ous
phenomenon.
The starship captain did not issue a terse command to the
astrogator to "Go to Warp Factor Five" or "Shift into Hy-perdrive,"
mammoth starship engines did not fill the ship with
a climbing howl of turbines or whatever, and the viewport did
not suddenly fill with cracked prism dopplered starlight as the
spacecraft ignored the Sisyphus Effect, achieved infinite mass,
and then "exceeded" it to "break" the speed of light. Instead,
it was all programmed into the ship's computers in advance
and when Point of Departure was reached, the Particle Ac-

80
	SIMON HAWKE

celerator Drive was activated automatically, translating the
ship and everything in it into tachyons. Einstein turned inside
out in his grave and the jump was made via tachyon beam
aimed through nonspace. No one aboard who was awake during
the process even noticed it happen. How can you notice
something that happens at multiples of light speed? It was
probably the safest form of travel, because only two things
could go wrong.

During the jump, there wasn't time for anything to go
wrong, because the jump was made in nontime, but at any
stage prior to jump, either the ship's programmer or the Earth
orbital-based traffic controller could make an error. If the
tachyon tracking beam wasn't aimed correctly, there was no
telling where you might end up. However, that was so rare,
what with the redundancies built into the system, it was almost
unheard of. It was more common, though still exceedingly
rare considering the consequences, for the ship's programmer
to make an error and fail to have the ship properly "beam-tracked."
If the ship got off the beam and made the jump,
there was nothing to control the direction of the tachyon flow
and all the little particles departed at multiples of light speed in
billions upon billions of different directions. Still, if you had
to go, it wasn't a bad way to die. You'd simply cease to exist
without even noticing it. Either that, or you'd wind up existing
everywhere at once, depending on which physicist you listened
to. I try not to listen to physicists; I only get confused.

Draconis Base was smaller than most orbital military bases,
housing only about eight thousand personnel, but another
thousand or so commandos lived off-base in other habitats.
The base itself resembled a sort of studded cylinder, with
docking ports and work and observation stations dotting its
exterior surface. A series of skyhooks connected it to a number
of the other habitats in nearby synchronous orbit. The
whole thing looked like some kind of exploded machine with
wires still connecting the various pieces as they "dangled" in
the sky.

As the ranking officer aboard, even though he was retired,
Breck rated being piped aboard the base. It was an impressive
display. Two squads of Special Service commandos lined up
on either side of the entry hatch and stood at attention in their
dress blues while the regimental sergeant-major piped the call
on an ancient traditional instrument known as a bosun's whis-

	PSYCHODROME
	81

fie. Breck snapped to a crisp attention in front of the Officer
of the Day, returned his salute, and said, "Permission to come
aboard, sir." It was pure ritual, of course, though it would
have been amusing if the OD had said, "No." I wondered if
we would then have been required to turn around and go back
home.

"Welcome aboard, Major Breck," said the OD.

"Thank you, Lieutenant," Breck said. "Please have the
men stand at ease."

"Sir. At ease, gentlemen."

"I appreciate the courtesy, Lieutenant," Breck said.
"However, I am a civilian now and would prefer to be treated
as such during my stay here. I expect no deference to my
former rank. Who is your base commander?"

"I understand, sir," the lieutenant agreed. "Colonel Renn
is--"

"Bill Renn?"

"Yes, sir. I've been informed that you served together. The
colonel wishes me to pay his compliments and ask if you and
your party would join him in his quarters."

"I'll be damned," said Breck. "Yes, thank you, Lieutenant.
We will. Please dismiss the men. I know they wouldn't be
spared from their duties for something like this and I hate to
cut into their off-duty time."

"They were all volunteers, sir. We had many more than we
required. Your reputation precedes you. With your permission?''

"Please."

"Ten.. HUT!" It was one sharp crack, not a boot heel out
of sync. The lieutenant saluted Breck. "Dismissed. Sergeant-Major
Harris, please escort Mr. Breck and his party to the
commander's quarters."

"Sir." The sergeant-major turned to Breck. "If you'll follow
me, sir."

We took a track shuttle that whisked us through a tube at a
brisk pace along the inside circumference of the cylinder. The
curvature was gradual enough that it wasn't really noticeable
unless you looked "up," toward the center of the cylinder.
Directly overhead, at least from our perspective, was a cluster
of modular buildings that were the living quarters of the base
personnel. We traveled from one group of buildings designed
along the Soleri Arcube plan, past the domed agricultural

82
	SIMON HAWKE

sector, where the food processing and recyling plants were also
located. The "acres" were multiple-tiered, hydroponic gardens
cultivated under controlled environment conditions.
Humidity, water vapor, wind, circulation, temperature, and
carbon dioxide concentration were all regulated within the
various microclimate domes. Sergeant-Major Harris gave us a
brief guided tour along the way, also pointing out areas we
passed that were overhead.

"We're completely self-sufficient here," he said. "We
don't really require any supply corps support, but occasionally
we'll requisition something on the next incoming ship. Since
we don't get too much traffic out here, obviously we need to
rely upon ourselves for nearly all the essentials. Such things as
ordnance and medical supplies we try to manufacture as best
we can."

"You require much in the way of ordnance?" I said.

"Not really, sir. Sidearms, mostly. The civilians can be a bit
unruly sometimes, but we never draw a weapon unless we're
fired on first."

"Wouldn't it be simpler to disarm the civilians?" Stone
said.

"It might be, ma'am," Harris said. "We could collect their
weapons and store them until they went down to the planet
surface or we could simply prohibit their owning any weapons
at all and issue them whatever we felt they needed when they
went down, then collect them when they came back up. Either
way might work, but it would require time and effort. We'd
have to watch out for people smuggling weapons in, conduct
inspections, set up armories at every habitat for storage.., it
would be more trouble than it's worth. The point is, we don't
really want to encourage people to come out here. Fire crystals
are a pretty powerful incentive as it is. If you know you stand
a good chance of getting killed either on the planet surface or
in the habitats, you might think twice about getting rich off
crystal hunting. We don't want people to think the habitats
are safe. We get a pretty rough crowd. If they want to kill each
other off, that's their business. We just keep them from getting
too far out of hand."

"If killing each other is okay," I said, "what do you call
getting out of hand?"

"Anything that threatens our control. Or anything that
threatens the safety of the habitats themselves. Something like

	PSYCHODROME
	83

that is usually a judgment call. We're passing what we call the
ranch," he said, segueing back into the guided tour as if talk
of killing people was no more remarkable than pointing out
various features of Draconis Base. Perhaps out here it wasn't.

"This is where we raise our meat. We maintain a small herd
of miniature beefalo, as well as pigs and chickens. It's not very
efficient food production, because they consume more weight
in feed than they produce in edible protein, but it gives us a
chance to have meat once in a while. Vegetarian personnel are
exempt from ranch duty, but a lot of them do it anyway
because they like working with the animals.

"We have fish as well. We've got a couple of ponds here
stocked with trout, for personnel who like to go fishing every
now and then, but most of our fish farming is done in the
aquarium. Actually, we only call it the aquarium; there isn't
any water in it. It's in a separate habitat we've constructed
outside the base. A weightless environment with high humidity.
The fish sort of float around and the absence of gravity
keeps their gills from collapsing. We have a fish farm duty
roster, but a lot of us like to go there even when we're off
duty. It's quite pleasant and relaxing. We've even got some
tropical fish. We don't eat those, of course, but they're pretty
to look at and fun to float around with. Some people might

consider this a hardship post, but it's not so bad at all."
"Ever go down to the planet surface?" I said.

"No, sir. Draconis 9 is off limits to military personnel, except
for ground base duty. And we're prohibited from venturing
outside the confines of the ground bases."

"Ever get curious about it, Sergeant-Major?" said Stone.
"We all do, ma'am. We've heard stories from the crystal
hunters, but we have to get along with those people. The only
thing that keeps the hunters from resenting our authority is the
fact that we're not in competition with them. We are the one
constant element out here, the only people the crystal hunters
can really trust. They appreciate that. And there are certain
compensations."

"What sort of compensations?" I said.

"Well, sir, a military posting is, to a large degree, what you
make of it. You take an outpost base roughly similiar to this
one--most people would regard that as a hardship posting.
But if you can find ways to develop the introspective side of
your personality, a posting like this can become quite pleas-

84
	SIMON HAWKE

ant. You find ways to enjoy what might otherwise be oppressive.
If you have a hard time doing that, then you spend
your off-duty hours working on ways to make your environment
more pleasant. In our case, we constructed an aquarium
from a hollowed-out and sealed asteroid and now we have a
sort of fish park to visit when we're off duty. You'll notice
we've done a lot to make things more comfortable. But this
posting is a bit unusual in that we have the other habitats; the
Fire Islands, as we call them. There's a lot of money to be
made out here if you can handle the life-style and the people
who come here aren't all crystal hunters. In some ways, being
assigned to Draconis Base is like being posted to a frontier
liberty port. The locals are a rough lot and they tend to like
their entertainment on the wild side. Life in the Fire Islands is
expensive to begin with, even if you don't go in for that sort of
thing. But if you keep good relations with the locals, there can
be a lot of fringe benefits. We'll be getting off at the next
stop."

The shuttle stopped at the cluster of modular buildings
where the base personnel lived and Harris led us to the of-ricers'
quarters. There was no segregation of married and
single personnel, primarily because there were no married personnel
assigned to Draconis Base. Special Service commandos
did not often marry outside of their own elite circles, although
it was known to happen. They were mules, incapable of having
children. The differences between them and "straights,"
as they called those who had been born the normal way, were
often significant enough to make the odds for a "mixed marriage''
fairly poor, except in certain rare cases.

Pair bonding was a natural human tendency, but it was unusual
in genetically engineered humans. They had a tendency
to think of their entire hybreed as an extended family unit.
The SS hybreed was the most unusual one in that the genetic
modifications were quite radical. It was not cloning as most
people understand the term. They did not all look the same.
They were not all derived from identical genetic material.
Rather, the augmenting genetic template was identical.

Beginning with normal human cells, donated from various
individuals, the genetic tailoring was accomplished in vitro,
working from a template assembled from various individuals
and races. Germanic and Nordic genetic material was combined
with African genetic material in order to select for those

	PSYCHODROME
	85

coded elements which often resulted in large-framed and
heavily boned mesomorphic body types. Depending upon the
original genetic material of the donor, SS hybreeds could
either come out looking very Aryan or with a sort of caf au
lait-colored complexion. They were bred for strength, high
IQ, resiliency, quick reactions, and stability under pressure,
traits which were not normally race-associated, so that portion
of the template had been created from a wide and varied assortment
of genetic material, including animal genetic
material taken from such creatures as jaguars and black
leopards. Someone once told me there was dolphin in there
somewhere.

I suppose that was one of the reasons why a lot of people
were prejudiced against hybreeds. The concept of the
ibermensch was bothersome to a lot of people and prejudice
was facilitated by the fact that SS hybreeds in particular were
not only a racial mixture, but were "part animal" as well.
There was nothing about them that made them look like
animals in any way and it was usually impossible to tell if a
person was a hybreed or not. But reaction time was a dead
giveaway and so was body movement. SS hybreeds could
move with the grace and muscular dexterity of jungle cats.
They looked like anybody else, but they were different largely
because most straights chose to perceive them as being different.

They did not have the advantage of birth within a traditional
family unit, so they developed a real closeness with each
other. Most of them did not have a procreative urge, but some
had a real longing for children, perhaps due to some carryover
of a strong nurturing instinct in the original cell donor.
These were the hybreeds who, upon retirement, pair bonded
with straights who had children from previous marriages.
Though not very common, these relationships were almost
always very solid ones.

Hybreeds lacked a sexual drive, though they were quite
capable of performing sexually. It was a matter of "dispassionate''
choice with them and their choices were motivated by
personality rather than by chemical considerations. That was
another reason why I was curious about what had transpired
between Stone and Rudy.

Colonel Renn's quarters were at the top level of the village,
which was arranged in the style of a multitiered mall. It was an

86
	SIMON HAWKE

attractive living environment, with hydroponic gardens, sculptures,
several aviaries, and a number of small fountains arranged
pleasantly in the open spaces between the tiers. The
architectural scheme was economical without being cluttered
or claustrophobic.

The actual quarters were a sort of modular penthouse, With
a large window looking out over the literally surrounding
landscape. He and Breck greeted each other warmly, using the
Roman handshake of the commandos--grasping each other's
forearms.

"Breck, you old bastard, it's good to see you!"

"It's been a long time, Bill," said Breck.

"Too long. I couldn't believe it when I heard you were coming.
Introduce me to your friends."

We shook hands all around. "Wild Bill" Renn was tall and
large-framed, as were all Special Service hybreeds, with close-cropped
graying hair and light blue eyes. His features were not
as well defined as Breck's and his face was slightly narrower
and longer, more Anglo-Saxon-looking. He was dressed in
base fatigues, loose-fitting, comfortable, light blue trousers
and tunic, bare of any decorations or insignia save his SS
shoulder and breast patches and the eagles on his epaulets.

"So you got your birds," said Breck, referring to the colonel's
eagles. "Congratulations. When did you become a base
commander?"

"Five years ago," said Renn. "And they sent me to this
paradise vacation spot."

"Looks pretty nice to me," said Breck. "I've seen lots
worse."

"Wait 'til you see the other habitats," said Renn. "Don't
judge the Fire Islands by Draconis Base. We generally don't
allow civilians here. An exception was made in your case."

"Then don't show me anything you don't want civilians to
see," said Breck. "Remember, we're psychos. They're liable
to broadcast anything we see or hear."

"I had assumed that," Renn said. "There's no need for
concern. Nothing on this base is classified. We just don't like
civilians running around loose. But while we're on the subject
of this broadcasting thing, what happens if you and I want to
have a private conversation?"

"No problem," said Breck. "Action scenarios are sometimes
broadc.ast live, but generally, they edit for maximum

	PSYCHODROME
	87

dramatic impact. In scenarios where we become involved with
people in ways that could be construed as invasion of privacy,
we're required to inform them that we're psychos. All that's

necessary is for you to refuse access to your privacy."
"How do I do that?"

"Simple. You tell me anything you don't want broadcast.
So far as your own personal privacy is concerned, you have
the right to deny use of same."

"How about if I want to make sure something gets broadcast?"

"Again, all you have to do is specify that," said Breck,
"but I can't guarantee you they'll use it."

"Okay, then I'd like this to go out to your audience," said
Renn. "I'll address them directly through you, if I may. I'd
like you home viewers to know that I consented to authorize
Psychodrome's use of Draconis 9 for one of their adventures
because I wanted people to have some idea of what it's really
like out here.., and down there on the planet surface. In the
past couple of years, we've experienced some growth in the
Fire Island habitats, growth we would frankly like to discourage.
This is not Earth, nor is it a formally established colony.
We have no laws here, except what I choose to have enforced,
and we have no police.

"Some people have come out here hoping to get rich
without having any idea what they're up against," Renn continued.
"It's dangerous. It's also very expensive. And crystal
hunters have a unique society of their own. They're not very
tolerant of outsiders. It stands to reason. They don't like the
competition and they have their own methods of dealing with
it. Some of those methods are rather extreme.

"If anyone considers coming out here, they should know
that they won't be made particularly welcome. It's not easy to
get the crystal hunters to accept you. The mortality rate is very
high. No one will protect you and no one will support you. An
average meal costs the equivalent of what most people on
Earth make in a week. And everything else costs a lot more. If
you run out of money, you don't have a lot of choices. You
can either try tO get someone to support you--which amounts
to slavery, because then you'll belong to them until you can
buy out of whatever contract you make--or you can sign
enlistment papers, which I'd be happy to arrange. That means
the service pays your way out of here in return for a twenty-

88
	SIMON HAWKE

year enlistment with no options. You're sent wherever the
service feels you're needed. Or you can take a short walk out
the nearest alrlock.

"As for what you can expect on the planet surface, I'll leave
you to judge that for yourselves after you've experienced this
so-called adventure. If you still want to come after that, it's up
to you, but don't say I didn't warn you. And now I'd like to
have that private conversation, so 'Cut,' or whatever it is you
show business people say."

We all "heard" Mondago's voice in our minds at the same
time. "Mr. Breck, please inform Colonel Renn that his wishes
will be complied with and that his remarks will be included in
the broadcast as he specified. And please thank him on behalf
of the company."

"The playermaster says fine," said Breck. "Your remarks
will go out as part of the broadcast and we're on our own time
as of now, until you release us for broadcasting again. And

I'm supposed to thank you on behalf of the company."
"Tell them they're welcome," Renn said.
"You just did," said Breck.

Renn shook his head. "Show business," he said sourly.
"It's all a lot of crap if. you ask me." He looked at Stone and
me. "No offense, people, but why the hell would anybody in

their right mind want to do this sort of thing?"

"Why don't you ask Breck?" I said.

"I know why he wants to do it," Renn said. "I never said

anything about Breck being in his right mind."
Breck grinned. "Thanks, Bill."
"Don't mention it."

"You don't really want to know, do you, Colonel?" I said.
"No, Mr. O'Toole, not really. I'm sure you have your
reasons. Besides, that's not why I wanted to see you people.
Breck and I have some old times to talk about, but I did want
to bring up a few important points about your stay here, so
there won't be any misunderstandings. These people make
their living hunting fire crystal. They risk their lives to do it. I
just want to make sure you understand that no one's going to
give you any special treatment. In fact, I've issued orders to
those under my command to go out of their way to make sure

no one thinks you're being treated any differently."
"Because of me?" said Breck.

"Because of you," said Renn. "You're something of a

	PSYCHODROME
	89

celebrity already. They know you're a former officer in the SS
who was stationed here once before. Your coming back now
to hunt for fire crystal doesn't look very good at all. They'll be
looking to push you, to see how my command reacts. The
three of you can look forward to some unusual attention. Bet
on it. Frankly, I don't give a damn what happens out there so
long as none of my people are involved. You'll be completely
on your own. Not a single SS commando will lift so much as a

finger on your behalf against any of the hunters."

",I understand," said Breck.

"I knew you would," Renn said. He glanced at Stone and
me. "If either of you can't handle that, now's the time to tell
me. You won't get another chance."

"I wasn't expecting any special treatment," Stone said.
"No problem with me," I said.

"Okay, then. Sergeant-Major, why don't you take Miss
Winters and Mr. O'Toole out to the aquarium. They and their
audience might find it an interesting experience. Major Breck
and I will see you back here in about one hour."

"Sir.*" Harris snapped to attention and saluted.

Renn returned his salute. "Dismissed."

Harris turned to us. "You're in for a treat," he said.
"You'll be the first civilians ever to visit the aquarium. Ever

come face to snout with a great white shark?"

"A what?" I said. "You're joking."

Harris smiled. "Wait 'til you see the punch line," he said.
"It's about sixty-five feet long."

-FIVE-

You don't live in Japan for five years without learning something
about fish, so even though I had grown up on Mars, I
knew what a shark was. I knew what a shark looked like and
I knew what the meat tasted like--quite good, actually--and I
knew that you could use the skin to make expensive boots and
jackets that were practically indestructible. The reason they
were practically indestructible is that a shark is practically indestructible.
And just as people ate sharks, sharks also ate
people. Only they were better at it.

I had never seen a great white, but I had heard some
frightening stories. The shark was one of the oldest life forms
in existence. They were around long before we were and they'll
probably be around long after we are gone. In spite of everything
we had done to our oceans, sharks survived. Sightings of
great whites were pretty rare, but occasionally one of them
would come up to the surface and eat a boat or something.
The thought of a sixty-five-foot great white shark living inside
a hollow asteroid in the system of 61 Cygni, about 65 trillion

	PSYCHODROME
	91

miles away from its natural habitat, was astonishing in itself.
The thought that I would soon be in there with the damn thing
was frankly terrifying.

We took a small shuttle from Draconis Base to the aquarium.
From the outside, it looked nothing like an ordinary
asteroid, even though it had started out as one. Most asteroids
were potato-shaped and pockmarked with craters, but this one
was spherical from the hoilowing-out process, which involved
using a solar mirror to bore a hole down to its center, placing
water tanks within the asteroid's core, then spinning the asteroid
and mirror-heating it to its melting point. As the asteroid
softened and melted, the spinning action pulled it into a spherical
shape while the tanks within the core slowly heated up,
finally exploding from steam pressure. The resulting expansion
created a much larger, hollow, spherical asteroid with a
thin crust, the interior of which could be sealed with fer-roplast.
The result was a finished shell for a space colony,
ready for interior construction.

Only in this case, the engineers of Draconis Base had used it
to create a huge orbital humidarium and fish hatchery. Rather
than leave the asteroid spinning to impart artificial gravity to
it, the engineers despun it so that the environment inside
would be zero G. The atmosphere within the "aquarium" was
a breathable one, though quite high in humidity.

It was obvious that the SS commandos had invested a great
deal of time and love in their project. It was practical as a food
source, but it had its aesthetic side as well. The inner asteroid
was divided into sectors; carefully controlled, pressurized environments,
misty and ethereal. It was like swimming through
a waterless sea. You could float, breathe, and talk without aid
of any special apparatus and do it all side by side with schools
of brilliantly colored fish. They floated everywhere, tumbling
lazily end over end, "swimming" in their weightless, waterless
ocean. Nutrients were misted into the air. Hydroponic plants
undulated upon "reefs" made to resemble coral containing
artificial caverns teeming with marine life. A sargasso of
sculptured struts webbed the interior of the chambers; struts
containing pipes to mist the air and release nutrient fog also
doubled as hand- and footholds. It was like some sort of surreal,
"undersea" children's monkey-bar jungle.

"My God," said Stone. "I've never seen anything so beautiful!"

92
	SIMON HAWKE

Sergeant-Major Harris floated beside us, using a small,
portable directional thruster to control his weightless flight.
"We weren't allowed to go down to the world below," he
said, "so we created our own out here. There's nothing else
like it anywhere. It's taken years to get it like this. A lot of us
spend almost all of our off-duty time in here. It may seem kind
of strange, but to me, this feels like home."

I remembered what I had heard about there being genetic
material from dolphins in the SS hybreed matrix and decided
that it didn't seem that strange at all. Even I, whose genetic
matrix had been dictated by eons of chance, felt spiritually
moved in this spectacular environment, and oddly at peace.
But then we had all come from the sea. Perhaps there was
some vague, far-off echo of an instinct responding to a primeval
call across the centuries.

"These fish are hybreeds," Harris said. "All designed to
survive in fresh water.., or maybe I should say fresh air." He
grinned. "It's pretty moist air, though. Takes a lot of getting
used to. Look over there," he said, pointing down, or at least
"down" relative to where we were. Stone and I looked in the
direction he indicated and saw an honest-to-God shipwreck on
one of the larger reefs. The wood was rotting and there were
gaping holes in the hull. A sheared-off smokestack was sticking
out at a crazy angle and corrosion was turning the brass
fittings green.

"I don't believe it," I said.

"That's my pet project," Harris said. "We call it the
Titanic. A bunch of us have been working on it for almost a
full year now. It's completely to scale. We've almost got it
right." He waved to several people who were working on the
"wreck." He led us through into another sector and it was like
floating through a nautilus chamber. "You're about to meet
our great white mascot," he said.

Stone glanced at him anxiously "You're sure this is safe?"
"You can never be sure of anything with sharks," said Harris.
"But he should have been fed by now, so he probably
won't be feeling very hungry."

"I heard somewhere that sharks were always hungry," I
said.

"You heard that, too?" Harris said. "Well, maybe we
shouldn't get too close then."

	PSYCHODROME
	93

"He's putting us on," said Stone. "Isn't he?"

I reached out and grabbed her arm. At the same time, I used
my thruster to immediately reverse my direction. The air was
suddenly full of sharks. There were dozens of them, all different
sizes, all different species. The sergeant-major was
floating right into the thick of them.

"They don't seem to be bothering him," said Stone, swallowing
hard.

"I don't care," I said. "I'm getting out of here right now."
"I'm sure the audience would be disappointed if you went
back now," Mondago's voice came to us both simultaneously
on tachyon broadcast through the interface. "How often
would they have a chance to confront a sixty-five-foot-long
extraterrestrial great white shark?"

"How often would they want to?" I said.

"Let's go," said Stone, hitting her thruster and pulling me
forward with her.

That little voice started speaking to me as we floated into
the midst of all those sharks. This can't be real, it said. You
can't actually be floating in midair with a school of sharks
tumbling all around you. It's like some sort of macabre surrealistic
painting; it can't possibly be real.

"Oh, my God!" said Stone as we floated through the school
of sharks, following the sergeant-major down toward a reef
·.. only it wasn't a reef. It was moving, floating in the mist
like some giant zeppelin. Harris looked tiny floating beside it,
like some remora fish. He waved us on.

"Meet Winslow," he said. He patted the monster. "Say
hello, Winslow."

That huge maw opened wide and every last nerve fiber in my
body went berserk. At the sight of that vivisectorium, primitive
racial memories sent waves of stark, raving terror screaming
up from deep within and it felt as if a giant fist had closed
around my heart and started squeezing. I panicked and hit my
thruster, accelerating back the way we came. I thought I
screamed, but no sound came out. My mouth was open and,
mentally, I was screaming, but my even my vocal chords had
froze with fear.

I slammed into one of the struts and rebounded off it,
tumbling wildly end over end. I hit one of the smaller sharks
and we both spun off into opposite directions. I kept tumbling

94
	SIMON HAWKE

until a couple of commandos on duty in the aquarium caught
me. Harris was there almost at once, pulling Stone along with
him.

"I'm sorry about that, sir," he said, sounding as if he truly
meant it. "These sharks don't attack humans. We've bred it
out of them. You're perfectly safe here."

"I feel like an utter fool," I said, humiliated in front of
Stone.

"It's my fault, sir," Harris said. "We'd best be returning to
the base."

"No," I said. I tried to avoid looking at Stone. "Not yet.
I'm going back."

"Go on ahead, sir," Harris said. "We'll just wait here."
The man understood. You take centuries of civilization and
all that it's accomplished and what you have, at best, is still a
thin veneer. And it doesn't take much to wear away that surface.
You never really know what will strip away the layers of
control until something happens that triphammers the adrenalin
and opens up the sluice gates, letting the primordial instincts
gush forth out of the depths of your subconscious.
There's nothing rational about it. I had simply reacted.

Now there was another primitive emotion at work, not quite
as powerful or overwhelming, but equally undeniable. The
man had shamed himself before the woman. The hunter, the
protector, had deserted the keeper of the cave and the bearer
of the children, leaving her to the mercy of the predator while
he abandoned all responsibility and fled to save his own miserable
skin. It made no difference that in the modern world,
those simple roles and definitions made about as much sense
as carrying a spear. Deep down inside, there was still a vestigial
machismo that said, "Thou shalt not reveal thy yellow
streak before the woman and fail to defend her from the scary
monster." So maybe I was being foolish, maybe I didn't need
to prove anything to Stone--who certainly did not require the
likes of me to protect her--and maybe I was only putting on a
false show of bravado for myself more than for anybody else.
Now that I knew Winslow wouldn't eat me, I could go back
and conquer my fear. It was all a lot of nonsense. But I had to
do it anyway.

I took a deep breath and hit my thruster. I started drifting
down toward that impossibly huge and terrifying fish, which
didn't seem any the less terrifying despite the fact that Harris

	PSYCHODROME
	95

told me it didn't attack people. But I had made up my mind
that I was going to do it no matter what. I set my teeth and
tried to control the unreasoning terror that welled up in me at
the mere sight of that awful thing. I had to keep telling myself,
it doesn't eat people. It only looks frightening. It's nothing
but a pet--it's just big, that's all.

And then that little voice started its Judas whisper. It's a
hallucinact, it said reassuringly. You were only frightened by a
vision in your mind. None of this is real. Go on. Nothing will
happen. You'll see. There's nothing to it. It's just special effects.

I reached out a tentative hand to touch the giant shark,
literally feeling my flesh crawl, then involuntarily jerked it
back at the last instant--and a plasma blast slammed into that
thick gray hide, pushing the shark away from me as it
thrashed, sending great globules of blood bursting out in all
directions like dark quicksilver.

For a moment, I didn't know what the hell was going on. I
was struck by bubbles of shark blood that burst against me
and then I suddenly realized that somebody was shooting at
me. I heard Stone yell something and I fired my thruster, sending
myself toward one of the struts. I hit it and rebounded,
spinning away just as another plasma blast slammed into the
strut, shearing it and sending globs of pressurized water and
nutrient solution spewing out in all directions.

Someone dressed in the uniform of an SS commando was
accelerating through the air toward me, firing a plasma pistol.
But with every shot, the burst of plasma coming from the gun
sent my attacker flying back in the opposite direction and he
had to quickly use his thruster to compensate and correct his
glidepath. I saw Harris give Stone a hard shove which sent him
flying in the opposite direction, and then use his thruster to accelerate
toward my attacker. A couple of the other commandos
were also closing in, but they were unarmed and the
assassin ignored them, concentrating on me. He was having a
difficult time in the zero-G environment and that was the only
reason I was still alive.

Harris got to him and "landed" on his back. They went
spinning end over end together, but the assassin managed to
dislodge Harris and, with a kick, sent him spinning back into
the other approaching commandos, which resulted in an
'abrupt change in his own direction. I had nothing I could use

96
	SIMON HAWKE

as a weapon, but then neither had the soldiers. There was no
reason for the commandos to go armed in their own fish park,
yet they were risking their necks going after the assassin unarmed
while I was running away again, trying to hide behind
an artificial reef. Common sense and a well developed instinct
for self-preservation told me to stay exactly where I was and
hope the commandos got the assassin but I just couldn't do it.
I was furious. I couldn't run away again. And somehow that
plasma pistol didn't scare me half as much as those giant shark
jaws had.

I pushed off from the reef and went sailing toward the
assassin. He was having a bit of a hard time shooting in zero
G, but he was learning fast. He fired at one of the commandos
and the opposing reaction sent him flying backwards, but the
plasma charge took the commando squarely in the chest and
he exploded into bits of charred flesh and globules of blood
and body fluids. The assassin fired his plasma pistol again to
change direction and now he was coming at me fast, aiming
· .. I hit my thruster and rocketed sideways just in time. The
.plasma blast barely missed me and sent him flying backwards
into Harris. They struck each other and rebounded in opposite
directions, spinning away.., and then one of the sharks
thrashed around and took the assassin's right leg off with one
snap of its powerful jaws.

The man screamed horribly as blood bubbles burst out
of his severed arteries. The sharks were all going crazy.
They were thrashing around, spinning crazily and tumbling
end over end through the air, their jaws snapping at anything
within reach. Another shark bounced into the assassin,
snapped its jaws, and his right arm went floating off
into the air, spraying globules of blood behind it.

Harris grabbed me from behind and I was suddenly
being pulled 'through the air away from the grisly scene as
he screamed, "Get out! Get out! Shut down the sector!"

We went rocketing through the nautilus chamber and
several other soldiers came through right behind us, the
last one pausing to close off the chamber and shut down
that sector of the aquarium. I frantically looked around
for Stone, saw that she was safe, and then the reality of
that man being torn to pieces by the sharks came home to
me and I did something nobody should ever do in a weight-

	PSYCHODROME
	97

less environment. I puked my guts out.

Colonel Renn was not sorry to see us leave Draconis
Base. I couldn't really blame him. Two of the men under
his command had died. I hadn't killed them, but if I hadn't
been there, they'd still be alive. The assassin had killed one
and the second man was killed along with the assassin
when the sharks went wild with blood frenzy. In spite of
what Harris had said, you can only manipulate so much
genetically. The smell of blood has been the feeding signal
for sharks for thousands of years. The sharks in the aquarium
were bred outside their natural habitat and raised in a
controlled environment on nutrient solutions and bloodless
protein. They were very different from the sharks on
Earth, but they still shared a common evolution. The smell
of blood had awakened a deeply ingrained instinct.

I tried to convince myself that none of it had been my
fault. I tried real hard, but I couldn't quite buy the argument.
People were dying around me. The number had gone
up to three now, starting with that young bandit shot down
by Saqqara's gunmen. If I was going to count the people
dying back on the Ginza in a gang war which, in a way, I
had initiated, that number would be a lot higher. It seemed
as if the only good thing I had accomplished since coming
to Earth was a new start in life for Miko and her family.
Maybe it wasn't much considered in the balance, but at
least it was something.

And then there was Stone. If she had been next to me
when that assassin made his move, she might have been
killed as well. That was the second time her life was placed
in jeopardy simply because she was with me. Breck was
right. The only thing to do was take care of Saqqara. The
trouble was, so far I hadn't shown much aptitude for taking
care of things. My leprechauns had pulled me through
somehow, but my Russian archbishops were predicting
that my run lof luck couldn't last much longer.

"You're being very quiet," Stone said as we rode the
skyhook shuttle to Casino, the largest of the Fire Island
habitats.

"I think I lost more than my lunch back there," I said.
"Don't be so hard on yourself, O'Toole," said Breck.

98
	SIMON HAWKE

"You've managed to survive a jungle campaign and two
assassination attempts. That must stand for something,
surely."

"It stands for pure dumb luck," I said, fighting back my
anger at his-mocking tone. "I've been extremely lucky to
have survived this long. If it wasn't for you that night in
the hotel, both Stone and I would probably be dead now.
As for that jungle scenario, I was so scared, I didn't know
what the hell I was doing. And the same thing happened
back there in the aquarium. I panicked."

"You don't think I was scared?" said Stone. "I was so
terrified I couldn't even move! I didn't do anything to help
you, did I? Or isn't that my responsibility?"

"Come on, Stone," I said, "this isn't a sex role thing.
Well, maybe it is to some extent, I'll admit that, but it
would have made no difference if you were a man. The fact
is that my fear overcame everything else."

"Fear is a perfectly normal human response to danger,"
said Breck.

"One which you don't seem to have," I said.

Breck shrugged. "I am not a perfectly normal human. I
was designed not to feel fear. Fear is a function of self-preservation.
It is nothing to be ashamed of."

"That's easy for you to say. You've never felt it."

"I don't need to experience fear to know something
about it," Breck said. "I've seen it many times. SS
hybreeds are fascinated by fear, because it is an emotion
we can't feel. I have experienced the fear of others through
the interface and while it isn't the same as feeling it myself,
I think I have an understanding of it. I often wish I had the
ability to feel it, because it's clearly a profound experience.
Evidently, you can only feel so much fear at any one time.
There seems to be a sort of limit, beyond which the mind
either dissociates or turns on you completely and shuts
down your systems, making you die of fright. When the
dissociation occurs, the mind retreats somewhere within itself
and becomes essentially dysfunctional. But sometimes you
reach the limit of your capacity for fear and you self-protectively
and quite unconsciously shift gears into some
other emotion. It could take the form of sexual excitement,
for example, or it could manifest as anger, an anger so in-

	PSYCHODROME
	99

tense that a terrified man pinned down by enemy fire can
suddenly charge the enemy batteries in an unreasoning
fury. Heroes were often very frightened people. Do you recall
what you felt like in the jungle when you made the
jump into enemy fire? You were clearly afraid, but you
acted with courage, with heroism. You were driven by your
fear and you did what was necessary to survive. Now consider
what occurred back there in the aquarium. You fled
from that shark in terror, yet you went back to face it
again."

"Sure, after I thought it was safe," I said.

"But did you go back only because you thought it was
safe?" Breck said. "You were still afraid, but you went
back because you were angry at the fear you felt. A phobia
is not a rational thing. People who are claustrophobic are
capable of understanding intellectually that they are perfectly
safe within a closet, that there is nothing in there that
will harm them. Yet try convincing someone with claustrophobia
to lock himself inside a closet. You can open it for
him, show him there is nothing harmful in there, go in
there yourself, and lock the door to demonstrate that it's
safe, but you still won't get him to go in and lock the door.
His fear controls him. He practices avoidance. That isn't
what you did, is it? You used your anger to overcome your
fear. You have been experiencing fear incrementally ever
since you first arrived on Earth. And you're growing more
adept at coping with it. There is an old saying: What does
not kill you, makes you stronger."

"Somehow I don't feel stronger," I said. "In fact, I'm
more aware of my weakness."

"The more aware you are of your own fears," said Breck,
"the more you understand them and the less power they have
over you. You're being called upon to use resources you have
never needed to develop before. Did you expect it to come
easilyT"

"I guess I hadn't thought about it that way," I said.
"Thanks, Rudy.,"

"For what?" he said. "I am not trying to do you any
favors. We are a team and you will not be of much use to us if
you're distracted by agonizing over your masculinity. I would
rather you concentrated on the job at hand."

100
	SIMON HAWKE

Stone shook her head. "You just can't do it, can you?" she
said. "The moment you start to show any sensitivity, you have
to ruin it somehow."

"I am only trying to keep things in perspective," Breck
said, a touch too nonchalantly, it seemed. I had a feeling an
old issue between them had been skirted. "But at least we
know one thing. This is no illusion."

He turned to me. "It's entirely possible Mondago could
have programmed an illusory attempt on your life into this
scenario if it were a hallucinact, especially after what occurred
at the hotel, but he could not have fooled me with an illusory
Bill Renn. We spoke about things only he and I knew, things
no playermaster could have pulled out of my mind without my
knowing it. So you can postpone your paranoia about induced
hallucinations. This is no hallucinact. Whatever it is we'll find
down on Draconis, it is going to be real."

Casino was a sphere about one mile in diameter, roughly the
same size as Draconis Base. At its poles were the massive external
radiators which removed heat from the interior of the
habitat and surrounding it like a planetary ring was an array
of mirrors directing sunlight through windows near the rotation
axis. It was a small habitat by modern space colony standards.
The design was originally meant to house between ten
and fifteen thousand people, but, according to Colonel Renn,
Casino held at least three times that number. It was crowded.

Casino, like Draconis Base and the other three habitats
which made up the Fire Islands, had started out as a tachyon
drive spaceship. During the late twentieth century and the
early part of the twenty-first, there had been much debate
about which was the more viable option for the human settlement
of space--terraforming or the construction of island
colonies. Each side had its champions and the planetary engineering
types were often fond of dismissing the island colony
proponants as bubble-headed counterculture dreamers while
the island colonists regarded the terraformers as "planetary
chauvinists," reactionaries bound by inefficient and outmoded
ideas. But, as so often happens, the optimum solution
was one of compromise.

Humanity evolved upon a planetary body and while some
people eagerly responded to the challenge of creating a Bernal
Sphere and living in an island colony, most people would al-

	PSYCHODROME
	101

ways prefer life upon a planet, with its own unique challenges.
Some pioneers didn't mind looking up and seeing a town
hanging upside down above them, but many found the effect
psychologically disturbing. They preferred the vista of a sky
and the challenge of taming open spaces.

Terraforming was a long and complex process, involving
finding planetary bodies--or creating planetary bodies--with
enough mass to hold an atmosphere and asteroids for use as
the building blocks of the new world to provide materials for
an atmosphere, to reshape the surface by impact, or to "spin
up" a planetary body to the desired rotation, following which
organisms would be introduced to begin the process of establishing
a biosphere. Sometimes it was necessary to dismantle
smaller planetary bodies, moons, or even planets themselves
to provide the raw materials. These things took time. The
people who began the work would not live to see its completion,
nor would their children. And they needed a place to live
while the work went on.

The advent of tachyon drive made it possible to build an
island habitat and use it as a starship to take the pioneers out
to the world they planned to tame. Ironically, the planetary
engineers would wind up living out their lifetimes in an island
colony. Their children would be born and raised there and
they would continue with the task. And when the world was
ready for human habitation, those who chose to go down to
the planet surface would do so while those who chose to remain
in the island colony would supply the technology and industrialization
to get the new world off to a good start and
keep it going without the damage to the biosphere that Earth-based
industry had wrought over the centuries.

Such had been the plan with Draconis 9, but when EuroCon
pulled out after the disaster, the island colonies remained.
They could have been refitted for space travel and transported
to a new terraforming project, but what made it more cost-effective
for EuroCon to sell them was the discovery of fire
crystals on the surface of Draconis 9.

Fire crystals possessed many of the same properties as
diamonds, only they were harder and more precious due to
their rarity. The first discovery of fire crystals occurred when
an asteroid containing them was found in the system of 61
Cygni. Not only did they turn out to be superior to diamonds
for industrial purposes, but their haunting beauty and rarity

102
	SIMON HAWKE

placed them in high demand as precious gems. Supposedly,
they had some sort of mystical, talismanic quality. I had never
seeen one or known anyone who had one, so I had my doubts
on that score. But one thing was certain. The value of fire
crystals was enough to make some people abandon everything
and emigrate to the Fire Islands, in spite of all the dangers.

The habitats originally meant to house the EuroCon planetary
engineers were now home to a wild agglomeration of adventurers.
Wherever the prospect of wealth existed, there
came those who sought it and those who came to exploit the
seekers. Casino was a densely packed orbital city of crystal
hunters, saloonkeepers, whores, gamblers, thieves, murderers,
and slavers. It made the Ginza Strip seem tame. The entire
habitat was a space-borne Combat Zone. There was no more
law in Casino then there was in the frontier boom towns of
Earth's Gold Rush.

Ideally, island colonies were designed to be self-supporting,with
their own industry and agriculture, but Casino had
neither. Every available inch of space was taken up by buildings
and by people. In the' beginning, the island colony plan
was followed according to design, but the steady influx of
people seeking to get rich soon upset the balance and the companies
controlling emigration to the Fire Islands were less concerned
with the living conditions in the habitats than they were
with the potential profits.

Only one of the island habitais now had agriculture and
there was some support industry, but it became increasingly
necessary for everything to be imported. Draconis Base was
self-sufficient, but life in the Fire Islands was an expensive
proposition. That suited the operating concerns just fine.
They could maximize their profits by running the island habitats
as frontier company towns.

There was a high turnover. Many of those who went down
to the planet surface never returned. Some achieved their
dreams of wealth and left, but far more became trapped by the
harsh realities of life in the Fire Islands. Many died in the
habitats themselves. It was a rough neighborhood, full of
predators. Those who couldn't pay their way found that there
was no shortage of "patrons" willing to extend them credit,
but this credit was iot given for altruistic reasons. In the Fire
Islands, people were a commodity, like everything else. You
borrowed against your freedom and if the marker was called

	PSYCHODROME
	103

in and you couldn't pay it off, you had a very simple choice.
Die or become someone's property. You couldn't go to a third
party and borrow to pay off your marker, because the human
sharks were very careful about things like that. The moment
you "established credit" with a shark, he became your
"banker" and the information was logged in the computer
banks. Other "bankers" consulted their computers before
"granting credit" and they didn't poach on one another's interests.
Something like that could be fatal. You either paid off
your "banker" or he "foreclosed" on you.

Colonel Renn was caught between a rock and a hard place.
If it was up to the military, the Fire Islands would be closed to
immigration, but it wasn't up to the military. The military
had no economic clout. The corporations operating the habitats
did. So long as the "quarantine" was preserved, which
was the unenviable job of the Special Service, no one cared
much what went on in the Fire Islands. Consequently, it was
hardly surprising that Colonel Renn did not care much either.
However, he had cared enough to allow Psychodrome to show
people just what life was like here in the hope that it would
discourage would-be immigrants. He felt confident it would.
We got a briefing and then we were on our own. Our experience
was supposed to frighten people off. I did not find that
very encouraging.

Our skyhook shuttle docked with Casino and we entered
the habitat through the zero-G access corridor at the rotational
axis. We floated through the corridor to the point where
it branched out into the axial passageways leading into the
habitat. There were directional signs over each of the corridors
and we took the one labeled "3rd Avenue South, Administrative,
Downtown Residential, New Arrivals." South meant
toward the zero-G access corridor and the docking areas,
North was uptown, "up" the inner surface of the sphere toward
the opposite pole. The main corridor continued on to a
point at the approximate center of the sphere,, where a club
called The Arena was located.

In the early designs for island colonies, this area was set
aside for low-gravity swimming pools. Imagine a spire extending
out through the center of the sphere, inside of which was
the zero-G access corridor. If you think of the habitat as a
hollow candy apple on a stick, then the docking areas would
be at the end of the stick and this spire would be that part of

104
	SIMON HAWKE

the stick which went inside the hollow apple. From where we
entered the habitat, the "top" of this spire was straight ahead
of us. From the point of view of the residences on the inner
surface of the sphere, it was straight up at the sphere's center.
Surrounding the top or end of this spire was a ring, the inner
surface of which had held the pools in the early designs. The
rotation that gave the habitat its gravity also kept the water in
the pools from going anywhere, but the intriguing design
meant that, just as the residents on the inner surface of the
sphere could look up and see other residences overhead, so
could swimmers in the pool look up and see other pools overhead.
Because of the decreased gravity near the rotational
axis, it was not only possible to jump off a diving board
straight up into an overhead pool, it was also possible to execute
porpoiselike leaps out of the water.

Casino, however, had no pools. Instead, there was The
Arena, where the ancient concept of the Roman circus had
been given a new twist. "Bankrupts"--as the unfortunates
who borrowed themselves into slavery were known--sought
their freedom as low-gravity gladiators in The Arena. The
habitat was aptly named. Once again, I had the feeling I had
bought into a game I could not afford.

I hoped there'd be a large audience for this one. I wouldn't
want Colonel Renn to be disappointed. If it had been up to
me, I would much rather have gone straight down to the
planet surface from Draconis Base. Not that I was anxious to
get there, but I was anxious to get this over with. Only the idea
was to give the home audience an authentic experience. New
arrivals did not come to Draconis Base. That was closed to ordinary
civilians. New arrivals came in to Casino, made residence
arrangements, and then tried to learn the ropes. No one
was allowed to emigrate to the Fire Islands unless they had at
least enough funds to get started. What happened to them
after that was their own concern. The only thing the operating
corporations cared about on Casino was collecting bills. And
they did not tolerate late payments.

I had been on island habitats before. There were several
above Mars. Those, however, had been much larger than the
Island One design of Casino. Still, even taking that into account,
Casino was not quite what I had expected. It made me
think of a modular Manhattan bent in around itself, with all
the skyscrapers cut off. Constructing tall buildings inside a

	PSYCHODROME
	105

Bernal Sphere wasn't practical design. With anything much
over several stories high, there was a decrease in gravity which
increased with the height of the building. Most island colonies
terraced their residences or, if population density was a consideration,
Arcube or other modular types of architecture
were employed. On Casino, this did not seem to be a major
consideration. There were no skyscrapers, of course, but there
were many multistoried buildings. What the hell, just pack
'em in, who cares about their comfort? Long-term health and
psychological effects? Why bother. If they want decent housing,
let them pay for it.

We didn't go through any sort of customs inspection; that
was all handled on the other end. Everything that arrived at an
island colony arrived clean. It wouldn't do to introduce insects
or plant blights or whatever into a controlled environment,
so preembarkation decontamination procedures were pretty
thorough. However, one look at Casino made me wonder why
they bothered. There was no pollution, of course, but they
didn't go to any trouble to keep the island city clean. I began
to see what Colonel Renn intended. Even at first glance,
Casino did not look particularly inviting.

We followed the signs to the administration complex, where
new arrivals were to check in, obtain their residence assign-ments-which
had been paid for prior to embarkation--con-firm
their credit, and pick up their orientation kits. It was a
typically bureaucratic procedure--hurry up and wait in line--but
we were quickly spotted and it became apparent that we
were not going to be treated as just any new arrivals. We were
descended upon by a tall, well-built, handsome and clean-cut
character with dark brown hair and a knee-jerk smile.

"Miss Winters! Mr. Breck!" I thought for a moment that I
was being ignored, but the slick hadn't forgotten me. "And
you must be Mr. O'Toole. On behalf of the Draconis Combine,
I'd like to welcome you to Casino."

It didn't take a genius to figure out who this guy was. It was
immediately clear that this was Casino's answer to Bob Stiers.
It figured. Travel 65 trillion miles and one of the first things
you run into is a PR flak. This must have been what the twentieth
century treehuggers--pardon me, environmentalists--meant
when they warned of mankind polluting space.

"My name is John Rudman, Corporate Liaison for Casino
and the Fire Islands community. We've been expecting you. If

106
	:SIMON HAWKE

you'll follow me, I'll see what I can do to expedite your arrival."

I thought we had already arrived, but who was I to argue.*
Breck looked amused. Stone looked at me and rolled her eyes.
Slick Rudman launched into a snappy patter monologue on
the wonderful opportunities to be had in the Fire Islands, a
monologue I was able to tune out without a great deal of difficulty.
He led us to an office suite in a modular complex, past
secretaries who gazed at Breck with undisguised admira-tionmhe
was a star, after all, and a dashingly handsome one at
that--and I noted that some basic facts of life had been exported
to Casino from the corporate womb of Earth.

Where women were excluded from the corporate power
structure, the men in key positions always selected from the
ranks of the drop-dead-beautiful for their secretaries. Women
who didn't fit the template didn't have a chance. It didn't matter
that the position was almost completely obsolete, with
computers able to do virtually all the work required. There
was and probably always would be a certain cachet to having a
human subordinate to command and the desirability of that
subordinate was supposed to say something about the superior.
Nor were corporate women any different. When they
reached those same positions of power, they often behaved exactly
like the men.

sep1 The office door opened onto a plush suite with a small
garden beyond it on the other side of a set of sliding glass
doors. Those doors were open and Slick conducted us through
the office and out onto the garden patio, where an older version
of himself was seated at a circular glass table. They didn't
look alike, but they were cut from the same cloth. Office
people. Soldiers of the corporate army. This one was a senior
officer, however, complacent and secure. White hair, blue
eyes, crow's feet and worry lines from the ascent to power. Executive
fitness cultivated through exercise rather than hard
work. He wore a dove-gray jumpsuit and a huge fire crystal
pendant at his throat.

It was the first such gem that I had ever seen and it was, indeed,
spectacular. It really seemed to have a flame burning inside.
I couldn't take my gaze away from it as I watched it
flicker from bright red-orange to violet-blue to amber-green.

"Ah, I see our stellar crystal hunters have arrived," he said,
getting to his feet and extending his hand to each of us in turn,

	PSYCHODROME
	107

starting with Stone, whose hand he held a bit longer than I
cared for. "Miss Winters... Mr. Breck... and, of course,
Mr. O'Toole. I'm Carson Sonoma, Chief Administrator for
the Draconis Combine on Casino. Do sit down."

He gave some sort of signal to Slick Rudman and the flak
nodded and departed hastily.

"I do wish I had the opportunity to greet you personally
when you first arrived," he said, smiling, "but I'm afraid our
Colonel Renn co-opted that privilege. I trust your stay at Dra-conis
Base was pleasant. You know, as a civilian, I've never
even been there. It must have been a fascinating experience for
yOU."

"It was interesting," Stone said. "Tell me, Mr. Sonoma, do
you make a habit of personally welcoming all new arrivals to
Casino?"

"Naturally not, Miss Winters," he said smoothly, "but you
must admit that you three are not just any new arrivals. You
are celebrities, bringing your experience to countless people,
some of whom may one day decide to emigrate to the Fire Islands
and seek their fortune here. Consequently, the Draconis
Combine felt compelled to issue, through me, a statement, as
it were. I understand that you are eager to proceed, so I will
take up as little of your time as possible."

"We appreciate that," Breck said. "The sooner we are able
to go down to the planet surface, the sooner we can attain our
game objective."

"Quite so, lVlr. Breck," Sonoma said. "Therefore, I will get
right to the point. Your home audience should understand
that there are fabulous opportunities to be had here in the Fire
Islands, but as with most things in life, you get nothing for
nothing. The Dra¢onis Combine runs this operation in the
spirit of free enterprise and adventure. People who come out
here are held back only by their own limitations. Life in the
Fire Islands is not without its risks, but to those individuals
who seek more out of life than the drudgery of living by the
clock, there is limitless stimulation to be found here. Whether
one chooses to become a crystal hunter or to engage in any one
of the many extraordinary service occupations Casino has to
offer, life here is fast and hard and thrilling. To those who can
meet the challenge, there is the potential of great reward."

As if absent-mindedly he played with the fire crystal at his
throat, turning it so that its inner flame danced brightly. I

108
	SIMON HAWKE

imagined the scene back on Earth, where the home audience
was plugged into their psy-fi sets, dreaming dreams of burning
fire crystals buying their way into a better life. Sonoma was
playing the scene for its maximum publicity potential, turning
us into an advertising medium. You can have one of these, he
was saying. All you have to do is squirrel away enough to buy
your way out to the last frontier, where men are men and
women like it that way. The message was "Come and live the
fantasy." It was corny as all hell, but a lot 'more potent than
anything Renn had to say. There was a little bit of Hakim Saq-qara
in our friend Sonoma.

"Colonel Renn didn't seem to think that life out here was
especially rewarding," I said.

"Colonel Renn has my greatest respect," Sonoma said,
"and I won't attempt to patronize you by pretending that life
is easy and that people don't occasionally get in over their
heads. Fire crystals are not simply to be found lying on the
ground down on the planet surface. And it is expensive to live
here. We offer a unique life-style, complete with unique pleasures
and luxuries. The cost is high, but you get what you pay
for. Sometimes people act irresponsibly and overextend themselves,
foolishly abusing their credit privileges. We cannot afford
to support those who will not carry their own weight and
our system may strike some as a bit harsh, but keep in mind
that those who have bankrupted themselves have no one but
themselves to blame. Still, if they work hard and apply themselves,
they can earn their way out of their bankruptcy. Everyone
has a chance here. What you make of it is up to you."

"What about the Draconians?" said Breck. "What chance
do they have?"

"With a man such as yourself, very little, I should imagine,''
Sonoma said, smiling broadly.

He had misunderstood the question, though I didn't think
he had misunderstood it on purpose. He wasn't the sort of
man who would be very much concerned with the welfare of
the natives. And it didn't seem probable that he had ever been
down to the planet surface himself. He didn't strike me as the
kind of man who took the sort of chances he spoke of. Breck
did not pursue it. There would have been no point in antagonizing
the man. We simply allowed him to finish his little
speech uninterrupted so that we could get out of there as soon
as possible.

	PSYCHODROME
	109

Rudman was waiting for us outside Sonoma's office, full of
cheer and excitement for us and ready to "conduct us personally''
to our residence--I wondered briefly if it was possible
to conduct someone impersonally and I supposed it
wasmbut Breck quickly put a stop to that idea.

"I appreciate the offer, Mr. Rudman," he said, "but I
think we would prefer to find our own way."

"Nonsense," Rudman said. "I wouldn't think of it.
Besides, you're new here and it can be quite confusingm"

"We do have our orientation kits," said Breck. "And don't
forget, the idea is to give the home audience a taste of what it's
like to come here and experience the adventure for themselves.
Having company officials giving us V.I.P. treatment really
would not do. We wish to give the home audience the authentic
thing, the undiluted essence of Casino, as seen from the
point of view of ordinary new arrivals."

"Yes, certainly, I can understand that," Rudman said,
"but surely escorting you to your residence would not detract
from--"

"I am afraid I really must insist, Mr. Rudman," Breck said.
"After all, you would not wish to disappoint our audience,
would you?"

"No, no, of course not," Rudman said quickly. "If you
will allow me to direct you, then--"

"We'll find our own way," Stone said, giving Rudman one
of her media smiles. "Thank you ever so much, John. You've
been wonderfully helpful."

We left an unhappy Rudman behind and proceeded outside
on foot, along 3rd Avenue, heading uptown.

"The Combine seems anxious to put its best foot forward,"
I said. "Why do I feel like a company recruiter?"

"Because that is the role in which Sonoma sees us," Breck
said. "But I fully intend to give the home audience the authentic
experience of Casino, whether the Draconis Combine likes
it or not."

"That isn't why we're here, Rudy," Stone said. "I appreciate
that Colonel Renn is an old friend of yours, but let's
not lose sight of our objective. We came here to get a fire
crystal. The game scenario is the important thing. I should
think you'd be the last person who'd need to be reminded of
that."

"I need no reminding," he said curtly. "I fully intend to

I 10
	SIMON HAWKE
win this game. But I will not do it at the expense of being used
as a salesman for the Draconis Combine."
"Does it really make any difference?" she said. "I know
how you feel about Draconis 9, but you're allowing the past to
interfere with what we have to do in the present. That's what
Mondago wants. We can't afford to waste any time. Remember,
we may have gained an early advantage, but there are still
other teams competing against us."
"I'm well aware of that," said Breck.
"Are you aware that we're being followed?" I said.
Stone glanced at me quickly. "What?"
We kept on walking. Breck frowned. "Are you certain?"
"Reasonably."
"Who is it?" Breck said, without looking around. "That
idiot, Rudman?"
"No. Someone dressed in a black jumpsuit. Shorter man,
more heavily built. I suppose he could just be heading in the
same direction as we are, but then why would he be so careful
about it? I've only caught a couple of glimpses of him while
I've been rubbernecking like a tourist. Maybe I'm being paranoid,
but he seems to be staying out of sight the rest of the
time. And doing it damn well, too."
"If we are being followed, I was not aware of it," said
Breck. "And that is not good. That is not good at all."

-SIX-

There is something to be said for paranoia. It grows on you.
Especially if it improves your odds for survival. Not long ago,
I thought I would be safe by leaving Tokyo, but even I 1.2
light-years wasn't far enough away from Hakim Saqqara to
guarantee my safety. It was typical leprechaun luck with Russian
roulette overtones. Only Arkady O'Toole would try to
hide out in front of billions of people on the mass media entertainment
channels. All anyone had to do to find me was turn
on his psy-fi set. I was imagining assassins lurking around
every corner.
Saqqara was sparing no expense to kill me. I had always
placed a considerable value on my life, but it didn't seem to
me that it should be worth so much to Saqqara. Why send
assassins all the way out to the Fire Islands? Why not wait
until I returned to Earth and have them go after me between scenarios? The assassin who had died in the aquarium must
have come out of the same ship with us. He had to have been a
ninja. No ordinary man could have infiltrated a Special Ser-

111

112
	SIMON HAWKE

vice base so effortlessly. He might have made his move while
we were still aboard the ship, unless he was concerned about
escape--something ninjas were not supposed to be concerned
about--but in all probability, he had been on downtime with
the rest of us during the voyage and there simply had not been
an opportunity. Besides, if he had killed me while I was asleep
aboard the ship, it would not have been very dramatic. Saqo
qara liked to do things flamboyantly.

I kept turning the whole thing over in my mind, thinking I'd
be more equipped to deal with it if I could understand it better.
Was Saqqara going to all this trouble simply for his own
entertainment? Or did he want a dramatic assassination on the
Psychodrome channels for the sake of his Yakuza superiors,
before whom he had lost face? It was probably a combination
of both. And it did occur to me there could be one other reason
why he was so anxious to eliminate me. The interface.

The interface wasn't true telepathy. It was chiefly an empathic
function. Shared perceptions, physical sensations, and,
to some extent, shared feelings. The intensity of the interface,
especially in terms of emotions, varied with the individuals
involved. As Breck had put it, some people were better broadcasters
than others. Apparently, I was a damn good broadcaster.
What did that mean in terms of my situation with
Saqqara?

People tuning in to me would not know exactly what I
thought, but they would have access to my feelings and I had
some pretty strong feelings about Hakim Saqqara. At least
some of that had to be coming through the interface. What
was I broadcasting to the home audience about Saqqara?
Fear? Anger? Hatred? The three of us had talked about Saq-qara,
but we had done it on our own time. Mondago undoubtedly
knew all about it, but the company would never
broadcast any segment of our experience in which we spoke
about Saqqara. Psychodrome wouldn't want to risk a lawsuit.
Still, the company could not be held legally liable for my feelings.

I didn't think it was possible to identify Saqqara from my
emotions, especially without a perceptual focus for them
present in the scenario, as had been the case with Stone. The
feelings might come through, but I didn't think the home audience
would know those feelings were directed toward a man
named Hakim Saqqara. However, Saqqara would know. And

	PSYCHODROME
	113

so would anyone who knew the details of my association with
him--such as the shoguns of the Yakuza.

That might explain Saqqara's eagerness to do away with
me. So long as I was still alive, I was a living testimony to his
mistake. Every time I experienced an emotion having to do
with him, he experienced it through the interface and knew
that emotion was directed at him, just as his superiors did. It
was an unexpected development. In a strange sort of way, the
shoguns of the Yakuza could tune into my adventure and experience
$aqqara continually losing face. It was all there for
them. I was a man Saqqara should have squashed like a bug,
still living, still defying him, rubbing his nose in it in front of
billions of people. Perhaps he thought I could expose him
somehow through the interface. For all I knew, that could be
possible, although I had no idea how. Either way, it had to be
galling to Saqqara to experience what I felt about him.

I had started out being scared of him, then, as Breck had
pointed out, I began to use anger to dissipate my fear and I
started feeling hatred for Saqqara. Could I take it one step farther?
How about contempt? Could I work myself around to
being amused by him? That would drive the bastard crazy.
Maybe I could work on it.

It really was funny, looked at in a certain way. There he
was, a well-respected businessman, a wealthy warlord of the
Yakuza, a Ginza kingpin, owner and operator of the classiest
club on the Strip, and he had allowed a nobody like myself to
waltz in and take him for a bundle in a card game. The poor
sap's ego was so fragile, he couldn't take losing, so he had to
even up the score. He went after me and broke me, but I still
managed to trump his ace in the end. Alone, completely destitute
and with his thugs hot on my trail, I yanked the Pyramid
Club right out from under him and turned it over to a bunch
of wild kids. The Ginza kingpin got displaced by a down-and-outer
and a gang of thrill-crazy scooter bandits. He put a contract
out on me and he couldn't even make that stick. Two
tries by the best assassins his money could buy and I was still
alive. It really didn't say much for the dreaded ninjas of the
Yakuza. True, I had some help, but these were ninjas, after
all, legendary warriors of the Silent Way. And they had been

beaten by a one-armed man and a couple of fish.
"What seems to be so amusing?" Breck said.
"What?"

114
	SIMON HAWKE

"You've got the most self-satisfied smirk on your face
have ever seen," he said.
"Oh, it's nothing, really. I was just thinking that my situa-'!
tion is not without its humorous side."
Stone looked at me with surprise. "Let me get thisl
straight," she said. "There've been two attempts on your life;i
we're in the middle of our most dangerous scenario yet; some
one's following us who could be another assassin on youri
trail, and you think it's funny?"
"I guess it all depends on how you look at it."
She frowned. "Are you all right?"
I grinned at her. "Hell, yes. I don't know, maybe I'm crack-i
lng up from the stress, but I think I'm actually starting t4
enjoy all this."
She glanced at Breck uncertainly. "Adrenaline-induced!
euphoria?"
"Possibly," Breck said. "Our friend seems to be testing the
limits of his capabilities and stretching them at the same time.!
Whatever he's doing, it seems to be working. He noticed out
tail before I did. And our black-garbed friend is still baclc
there, by the way. I have spotted him a few times out of the
corner of my eye. I am not quite sure what to make of that.
he is a ninja, we should not have spotted him at all."
"If you ask me, those characters are overrated," I said.
these ninjas were everything their reputation says they are, I
would have been dead by now."
"Perhaps," said Breck, looking at me strangely.
"I just think it's sort of funny, all this trouble to take out
little guy like me and they can't seem to get it done."
"He's losing it," said Stone.
A slow smile of comprehension spread across Breck's face.
"No, I do not believe so," he said. "I suspect he may be gain
lng something."
"What?" said Stone.
Breck grinned. "A proper perspective, perhaps."
We reached our assigned modular unit and entered, following
directions to our apartment. We had agreed to share one.
Safety in numbers. Besides, it seemed that damn few people in
Casino were able to afford private accommodations. Rent was
not cheap and space was scarce. Nevertheless, it was a surprise
to see that our apartment was a suite, spacious and airy, complete
with a small garden. It was well furnished and clean and

	PSYCHODROME
	115

ar more luxurious than anything I had expected.

"This is a typical apartment for new arrivals on Casino?"

Stone said, dropping her bag on the long couch.

"I smell a rat," said Breck.

"I smell the PR department of the Draconis Combine," I
said.

"I think you are absolutely right," said Breck. "This kind
of apartment, in this part of town--I would say someone was
stretching the truth a little. We will not find any other new arrivals
in this sector. We should arrange passage down to the
planet surface as soon as possible, but before we do, I would
like to find out who has been following us. I would also like to
give our audience a more accurate picture of life in the Fire
Islands. Mr. Sonoma has purposely put us in the best living
quarters, in the best residence village. Our neighbors are probably
all credit bankers and businessmen. Before we go down to
Draconis 9, we should expose our home audience to some of
the less fortunate residents out here."

"I don't really see how that's going to help us," Stone said.
"I don't like what Sonoma's doing any more than you do,
Rudy, but your friend Colonel Renn is trying to use us, too.
Everybody has a vested interest. Ours is getting back in one
piece with a fire crystal."

"Your point is well taken," said Breck. "However, there
are still the ratings to consider. We owe it to our audience to
make our experience as interesting as possible. And I think a
visit to the downtown sector would be interesting."

He opened his bag and took out a monster plasma pistol,
jacked out the power pack and checked it, then snapped it
back into the gun. He removed a holster from the bag and attached
it to his belt on the right side so he could cross draw
with his left hand.

"What do you say we go out for a night on the town,
O'Toole?" he said, reaching into his bag and pulling out a
similar pistol, snugged down in a holster. He tossed it to me. I
caught it in both hands. It was a heavy piece, with a barrel
almost a foot long. It weighed close to five pounds. You don't
fire plasma from a plastic zip gun. This was the heaviest density
nysteel alloy. Serious artillery.

"All right," said Stone, unpacking her own piece and slipping
into her shoulder holster rig, "I'm not about to let you
two pick up all the ratings points." She took out two long,

	114
	SIMON HAWKE

"You've got the most self-satisfied smirk on your face I

	have ever s
	"
'

	een, he said.

"Oh, it's nothing, really. I was just thinking that my situation
is not without its humorous side."

Stone looked at me with surprise. "Let me get this
straight," she said. "There've been two attempts on your life;
we're in the middle of our most dangerous scenario yet; someone's
following us who could be another assassin on your
trail, and you think it's funny?"

"I guess it all depends on how you look at it."

She frowned. "Are you all right?"

I grinned at her. "Hell, yes. I don't know, maybe I'm cracking
up from the stress, but I think I'm actually starting to
enjoy all this."

She glanced at Breck uncertainly. "Adrenaline-induced
euphoria?"

"Possibly," Breck said. ur friend seems to be testing the
limits of his capabilities and stretching them at the same time.
Whatever he's doing, it seems to be working. He noticed our
tail before I did. And our black-garbed friend is still back
there, by the way. I have spotted him a few times out of the
corner of my eye. I am not quite sure what to make of that. If
he is a ninja, we should not have spotted him at all."

"If you ask me, those characters are overrated," I said. "If
these ninjas were everything their reputation says they are, I
would have been dead by now."

Perhaps, said Breck, looking at me strangely.

"I just think it's sort of funny, all this trouble to take out a
little guy like me and they can't seem to oot it ,4 .....

He s losing it, said Stone.

	A slow smile of comprehension spread across B '

reck s face.
"No, I do not believe so," he said. "I suspect he may be gain-

lng something."

	"What?" said Stone.

	Breck grinned, proper perspective, perhaps."

	"A
	·

We reached our assigned modular unit and entered, follow-lng
directions to our apartment. We had agreed to share one.
Safety in numbers. Besides, it seemed that damn few people in
Casino were able to afford private accommodations. Rent was
not cheap and space was scarce. Nevertheless, it was a surprise
to see that our apartment was a suite, spacious and airy, complete
with a small garden. It was well furnished and clean and

	PSYCHODROME
	115

Tar more luxurious than anything I had expected.

"This is a typical apartment for new arrivals on Casino?"

Stone said, dropping her bag on the long couch.

"I smell a rat," said Breck.

"I smell the PR department of the Draconis Combine," I
said.

"I think you are absolutely right," said Breck. "This kind
of apartment, in this part of town--I would say someone was
stretching the truth a little. We will not find any other new arrivals
in this sector. We should arrange passage down to the
planet surface as soon as possible, but before we do, I would
like to find out who has been following us. I would also like to
give our audience a more accurate picture of life in the Fire
Islands. Mr. Sonoma has purposely put us in the best living
quarters, in the best residence village. Our neighbors are probably
all credit bankers and businessmen. Before we go down to
Draconis 9, we should expose our home audience to some of
the less fortunate residents out here."

"I don't really see how that's going to help us," Stone said.
"I don't like what Sonoma's doing any more than you do,
Rudy, but your friend Colonel Renn is trying to use us, too.
Everybody has a vested interest. Ours is getting back in one
piece with a fire crystal."

"Your point is well taken," said Breck. "However, there
are still the ratings to consider. We owe it to our audience to
make our experience as interesting as possible. And I think a
visit to the downtown sector would be interesting."

He opened his bag and took out a monster plasma pistol,
jacked out the power pack and checked it, then snapped it
back into the gun. He removed a holster from the bag and attached
it to his belt on the right side so he could cross draw
with his left hand.

"What 1o you say we go out for a night on the town,
O'Toole?" he said, reaching into his bag and pulling out a
similar pistol, snugged down in a holster. He tossed it to me. I
caught it in both hands. It was a heavy piece, with a barrel
almost a foot long. It weighed close to five pounds. You don't
fire plasma from a plastic zip gun. This was the heaviest density
nysteel alloy. Serious artillery.

"All right," said Stone, unpacking her own piece and slipping
into her shoulder holster rig, "I'm not about to let you
two pick up all the ratings points." She took out two long,

	116
	SIMON HAWKE

slim, nysteel-bladed commando knives and slipped one into
each of her boottops, fastening the retaining straps on the
sheaths tightly around her calves. She also took out a small
plastic zip gun and dipped it to her belt.

"What," I said, "no hand grenades?"

"I'm saving those for the planet surface," she said.

I glanced at Breck. "Is she kidding?"

"Difficult to say," said Breck. He snikked out his knives,
then retracted them again, checking the action on his arm. "I
understand that downtown is a rough neighborhood."

I strapped on the pistol. "Compared to you two, I feel a
little underdressed.'

"There is such a thing as outgunning your own capabilities,''
said Breck. "Considering your situation, my advice is
to invest in some personal defense and weapons programming
when we return to headquarters. You have already picked up a
little knowledge from the mercenary program, but you could
do with the full course. It is not inexpensive, but you should be
able to afford it after this scenario."

"Great. What do I do meanwhile?"

"Aim carefully and try to avoid burning your own foot
off," Breck said.

"Thanks. I'll try to remember that."

"And try not to lose the gun," said Breck. "It is my personal
property and I will be irritated if you allow someone to
take it from you."

"Why do I have the feeling you don't have a great deal of
confidence in me?" I said.

"Don't take it personally," said Stone. "He doesn't have
confidence in anybody but himself."

"An attitude I recommend," said Breck. "It builds self-reliance."

"I'll keep that in mind," I said. "Where do we start?"
"Why not start where all the action is?" said Breck. "We
can take in a show at The Arena. That should give us an opportunity
to check out the more successful locals.., at the
same time as the more unsuccessful ones. And if we are being
trailed by a ninja assassin from Earth, I would prefer to encounter
him in an area of low gravity, where his reflexes will
be off."

We locked up our quarters and set off on foot, headed
downtown. We wore our weapons in plain sight, but we had

	PSYCHODROME
	117

already seen that this was not unusual in Casino. Everyone
went armed and those who could afford it hired bodyguards,
of which there was no shortage.

Casino was an island colony boom town. The uptown sectors,
especially the residence village to which we had been
assigned, smelled of heavy money. Downtown had the sleazy
glamor of a cheap whore. I was not unaccustomed to that son
of atmosphere. Downtown Casino had a lot in common with
the Ginza Strip, only on the Ginza, you couldn't look up and
see buildings hanging upside down above you.

The Draconis Combine operated Casino on the most cost-effective
basis. Build cheap, pack them in as tight as possible,
charge them all the traffic will allow, and then leave them to
sink or swim on their own. Fire crystals were more valuable
than gold, platinum, or diamonds. They were in high demand
both as jewelry and as industrial gems. There was money to be
made here and wherever there was money to be made, the
predators moved in. Those who came to hunt for fire crystal
were in the minority, vastly outnumbered by those in the
"service occupations," as they were described in the orientation
material. There were the credit bankers, the saloonkeepers
and the small businesses operating on license from the
Combine, the gamblers, the hustlers, those who sold themselves
for sex or violence (or both) and those who came seeking
their fortunes and now sought nothing but survival. But
the crystal hunters were the glamor boys, the raison d'etre
for the entire operation. They were almost exclusively male
and the few women among them were frighteningly hard.
They had to be, because the fraternity of crystal hunters was
not a very friendly one.

They were, after all, competitors. In the habitats, they
treated each other with respect and there was an iron camaraderie
among them. On the surface of Draconis 9, all bets
were off. Down on Draconis, the guy who bought you a drink
and backed you up in a bar fight in Casino was just as likely to
be the same guy who slagged you and took your crystal. The
veteran hunters found no inconsistency in this. They had romanticized
their own existence into a sort of gladiatorial mode
--comrades in the barracks, fighters to the death down on
Draconis. And the ones who couldn't cut it often wound up in
The Arena. It was a different field of battle, but the rules were
still the same.

SIMON HAWKE

The glamor of all this was lost on me, but then I had an unfair
advantage in having lived on the Ginza Strip. Casino, like
the Ginza, had a certain sleazy glamor to it and no glamor is
quite so compelling as the sleazy kind. Take an attractive
woman and dress her in the most exquisitely tasteful outfit,
one that speaks in subtle tones of charm and sophistication,
and then take her identical twin sister and deck her out in a
sleazy, garish outfit that shows off more than it conceals and
speaks of nothing more complicated than easy availability and
see who draws the bigger crowd at a party. Women understand
that one far better than most men do, simply because
they've got a longer history of being judged superficially.
That's why the sex object male is generally of less interest to
them than the sex object female is to most men. Women may
respond to the strutting rooster on a purely visceral level, but
when it comes to laying down the cards, they'll usually look
for something more substantial. The pendulum of sexual
politics has swung back and forth throughout the centuries,
but one thingmunfortunately--has always remained constant.
Men are generally less in control of their procreative drives
than women are. Ironically, we seem to think it's the other
way around. Consequently, we're more susceptible to confusing
love with sexual attraction and, perhaps because of that,
we're more susceptible to sexual manipulation. I've heard
arguments that women use that weapon because it's the one
that evolution gave them, but I'm not entirely convinced of
that. You get back what you give.

Casino was a lot like a beautiful woman who learned that
lesson early and chose to emphasize her superficial aspects
because it was the easy way and no one really expected any
more of her. So if you looked at Casino superficially, you saw
a lot of flash and dazzle, a lot of implied promises, and a lot of
trashy charm. But if you looked a little closer, you could see
that the mascara had been slept in and the eyes it had been
meant to emphasize were vacant. Look closer still and you
would see the crow's feet that the makeup tried to hide, the
bags concealed by shadow once artfully applied and now put
on by rote. Casino was a pretty girl who never took the trouble
to grow into a woman. She had skipped that crucial step in her
development and now she was a graceless, aging adolescent,
still giving pouting looks and hipshots to equally graceless,
aging adolescent males pursuing boyhood dreams of wealth

	PSYCHODROME
	119

and power. It depressed me all to hell because it hit so very
close to home and because I knew my presence here was part
of a sales campaign that kept the whole thing going.

Colonel Renn thought our being here would expose Casino
and her sisters for the pathetic sluts they really were, but I
knew better. Carson Sonoma had known better, too. Breck
thought we could bypass Sonoma's PR ploy by resisting the
temptation to remain in our plush residence uptown and going
to the sleazy downtown area, but the damage had been done.
The audience back home had seen the luxury Casino 'had to offer
and that's what they would remember. People had a
tendency to edit reality to suit their own preferences and expectations.
They would dwell upon the trashy glamor and the
heavy money, the promise of adventure and the easy thrill,
and they wouldn't think about the down side--what it would
be like if they were not among the few who made it big here.

I always thought about the down side. My Russian archbishops
made a practice of pointing it out to me. They helped
to balance out my overly optimistic leprechauns. When I was a
little kid, a bunch of us had pooled our allowances and
bought a holocube of King Arthur and his Knights of the
Round Table. It was used and some of the images were faded
from some other kids watching it over and over again. I
remember it was the most popular cube around that month
and all the older kids were talking about it and acting out its
plot. Everyone was talking about how wonderful it must have
been to live in those days and dress up in those shiny suits of
armor and joust and go on quests and rescue maidens. I mused
aloud that it couldn't have been very glamorous to live in a
time when there wasn't any plumbing and no one cleaned
themselves off after going to the bathroom. I wondered about
never taking showers and smelling like something died inside
you and suffering from tooth decay and vermin and all sorts
of diseases. I wondered about the disadvantages of making
love to rescued maidens who had never heard of birth control
and I brought up the awkward subject of the much shorter
lifespan they would have had in those days. I pointed out that
nysteel was a fairly recent invention and that those handsome
suits of armor must have weighed a ton and what did you do
when you had to scratch yourself in the middle of a joust? I
ruined it for everybody. For about a day, everyone went
around feeling disappointed, but the next day, they were right

120
	SIMON HAWKE

back at it again, ignoring everything I had told them. I remember
feeling very puzzled by this. I had researched the subject
thoroughly and I knew I had my facts right. The one fact I
had overlooked was that people aren't very interested in truths
that conflict with their preconceptions. However, I was too
young to understand that, so I simply joined everybody else in
their games. And as I recall, my knowledge of the facts didn't
stop me from playing "let's pretend" and having a good time.

We had reached the downtown "business sector" and
people started to accost us, anxious for our business. Some of
these people were male, some were female, and some seemed
unsure of themselves. In the space of one short block, we were
offered every physical diversion I had ever heard of and some
that would have raised eyebrows even on the Ginza Strip. We
were offered drugs and weapons, "business opportunities"
and bodyguard services. A group of these bodyguards became
particularly insistent and it looked as if things were about to
get ugly. I was about to reach for my sidearm and Breck had
stepped forward toward them when they suddenly backed off,
looking not at us but at something behind us. Not wanting to
take my eyes off them, I turned sideways and risked a quick
glance, but Breck and Stone were more experienced and she
quickly moved to stand back to back with him so she could
check our rear and he wouldn't have to take his eyes off the
toughs in front of us. It could have been a fake-out ploy by the
toughs, but it wasn't.

There was a man standing in the center of the street about
fifteen or twenty yards behind us. He was large-framed and
muscular, completely bald, and dressed all in black. His effect
on the bodyguards so anxious to sell us their services was immediate
and dramatic. He never even said a word. All he did
was stand there, legs spread slightly apart, arms hanging loose
at his sides, and they simply made themselves scarce.

Breck turned around, frowning. "I would like a word with
you..." he began, but the man abruptly turned and walked
away.

I drew my weapon, but felt Breck's hand on my arm.
"No," he said, shaking his head.

"I wasn't going to shoot him in the back," I said.

"I did not think you were," Breck said. "However, waving
that thing around and shouting, 'Stop or I'll shoot' or
something equally inane could prove counterproductive. Guns

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	121

are for killing people. Unless you are prepared to do that, do
yourself a favor and keep yours in its holster."

I bridled at his tone, which sounded condescending to me,
and then I realized that he was absolutely right. I had acted
like the rookie that I was. There wasn't any point in threatening
someone with a weapon if you weren't prepared to make
good on the threat and, if you were, it wasn't very smart to
warn them. I replaced my gun in its holster. Breck looked at
me as if he expected a response, but when I didn't give him
one, he merely nodded.

"What was that all about?" said Stone.

"I am not quite sure," said Breck, "but I suspect our shadower
is not what we thought he was. Those men clearly knew
him and they just as clearly thought it prudent to avoid him."

"You think Sonoma's been kind enough to provide us with
a bodyguard?" said Stone.

"It would stand to reason," Breck said. "Sonoma obviously
seemed anxious to give us V.I.P. treatment. I would still
like a word with that man, though, somewhere where he will
not be able to walk away so quickly."

We went on to the central axis of the colony and made our
way through the zero-G corridor to The Arena. We floated
"up"--relative to the inner surface of the habitat--toward the
end of the central axis spire, located at the approximate center
of the hollow sphere. It felt strange to be walking normally
one moment and then, a few moments later, to enter the
zero-G corridor and "fly" through it. The corridor was wide
enough to fly a small aircraft through and it was shaped like a
long tube. For the new arrivals who were unaccustomed to
zero G, there were short safety lines that attached to cleats
which moved on tiny rails in both directions, similar in principle
to sky hooks or, perhaps more appropriately, to old Earth
ski lifts. You just clipped one end of the line to your belt and
the other to a cleat and you were towed along on the conveyor
to your destination. Otherwise, there were plenty of handholds
along the inner surface of the corridor and the experienced
habitat residents simply used them to launch
themselves on traverse patterns down the corridor.

The end of the zero G corridor opened out onto the bottom
of a deep, basin-shaped amphitheater. Imagine an impossibly
large, incredibly deep champagne glass with an overturned-fishbowl
covering it, so that the glass extended up inside the

122
	SIMON HAWKE

fishbowl. The fishbowl was Casino and the champagne glass
its central axis. The inhabitants lived on the inner surface of
this fishbowl and the hollow stem of the champagne glass was
the zero-G corridor. The corridor opened out onto the glass
itself and the curved inner surface of the glass was The Arena.
Along the rim of the glass, there was a promenade offering
strollers a spectacular, 360-degree panoramic view of Casino.
It was like walking around a giant rollercoaster loop-de-loop
and the principle was similar. All around you, in all directions,
you could see the island colony. You could lean out over the
balcony railings, look down, and see residence villages curving
around below you. Or you could look straight out and the
view would be similar. Then you could look up and see a
similar sight, with people walking on the promenade above
you. To someone who had never been in an island habitat
before, the experience could be profoundly disorienting and
disturbing. You could always spot the new arrivals. They were
the ones with their hands frozen to the balcony railings, eyes
wide with panic, bodies rigid, convinced they were falling even
though they were on a solid pedestrian walkway. The nicer
people did their best to pry them from the railings and take
their arms, walking them around until they grew accustomed
to the sensation. The people who were not so nice just chuckled
and left them to stand there, immobile and terror-stricken.

The Arena was both a low-gravity amphitheater and
nightclub. The tables were arranged like theatrical boxes,
tiered on the inner surface of the basin. The domed stage was
constructed above the entrance archways from the zero-G corridor.

Most of the fighters were bankrupts who had failed to find
their fortunes in the Fire Islands, desperate individuals seeking
to free themselves from Casino's credit bankers and stake
themselves to one more run or to a ticket home. They provided
a constant influx into the gladiatorial ranks. It was possible
for a bankrupt to win enough in the arena to buy his way out
of debt, but it was rarely possible as the result of only one
match. And the combat could be fatal. The odds of that were
increased if an inexperienced fighter drew a match with one of
the hardcore professionals. Some of these men had begun
their gladiatorial careers as bankrupts, had fought successfully
enough to pay their debts off, and had chosen to continue in
the arena as "independent" fighters. Others were crystal

	PSYCHODROME
	123

hunters or bodyguards who enjoyed an occasional fight in the
arena as a means of supplementing other income. Anyone
could enter the arena by registering with the Board of Games.
This could be done as easily as ordering a drink from your
table. The waitress would bring you a small computer terminal
and you would punch in your registration and receive your
match in moments, then you could simply relax and enjoy the
show until your turn came. Fighters were rated by experience
and there was a handicapping system which could apply either
to the mode of combat or to an adjustment of the prize money
or to both. And if you were really up for gambling, you could
go for the big money by selecting the option of combat to the
death.
There was nothing illegal about it, largely because Casino
wasn't very legal to begin with. It was administered by a
multinational combine and its operations were all based upon
contractual agreements. Failing to honor a contract was likely
to result in another contract meant to enforce the first one.
And given the character of the residents, the only quicker way
of getting yourself killed would be by trying to pass a law. The
corporate advertising of the Draconis Combine made much of
the libertarian life-style to be found in the Fire Islands habitats
and, strictly speaking, they did not exaggerate, but freedom is
a tricky word.
The bankrupts of Casino were free when they arrived, but
they did not find quite the utopia they had expected. Freedom
did not mean freedom from responsibility. Freedom meant
they were exempt from any regulations outside the contractual
provisions they agreed to, but it also meant that others were
equally exempt and there were no regulations to turn to for
protection. One had to accept one's own responsibility for
that. There were no social welfare programs to support those
who could not support themselves and charity was not widely
practiced in the habitats. It was too expensive. There was no
police force. The Special Service had unquestioned authority,
but only insofar as maintaining the quarantine was concerned.
The SS had neither the time nor the inclination to involve itself
in the internal matters of the colonies. A libertarian society
seemed like an intoxicating idea to many new arrivals, but few
of them had given much consideration to how dependent they
had been on statist programs. Casino was a harsh and heady close of freedom, an anarchistic society sponsored by a multi-

124
	SIMON HAWKE

national. A peculiar place; a dangerous life-style. Many new
arrivals found they didn't like freedom quite so much when
the other guy was just as free. Their unconscious dependence
on society's rules often got them into trouble and many of
them wound up in The Arena. Nobody forced them. They had
a choice. A free choice. But sometimes a choice can be no
choice at all.

A dazzling-looking hostess dressed in an outfit that could
have been washed in a martini glass led us to a table. In the
low gravity, she moved with a practiced sensuality that would
have been difficult, if not impossible, to duplicate in Earth-normal
gravity. The gravity at the lower end of the
basin--that is, nearer to the stage and to the entrance--was
less than the gravity at the farther or upper parts of the amphitheater.
Obviously, the closer one was to the central axis,
the less the gravity and, at the center, there was zero G. The
stage was constructed over the zero-G central axis corridor,
but it was much wider than the corridor, so that at the outer
edges of the stage, there was low gravity while, nearer to the
center, there was zero G. There were several matches in progress
simultaneously as we entered, the clear domed stage being
at least as large as the arenas of the ancient Roman circuses.

The low- to zero-G environment made for interesting combat.
It was interesting in the same way that a Spanish bullfight
could be interesting. One did not necessarily have to approve
of the event to be fascinated by it. A good number of the
fighters moved with the grace of ballet dancers in slow motion,
though this was an illusion. There was nothing slow
about the combat. The new arrivals were painfully easy to
spot. It was all they could do to function at all in low gravity,
much less zero G, and they lost quickly. I noticed something
happening that was straight out of the traditions of the ancient
Roman circuses. When one fighter brought another down or
disarmed him, he would look to the audience to decide his opponent's
fate and they would signal either thumbs up or
thumbs down. The vast majority gave thumbs up, but not
necessarily because they were disposed to be merciful. Our
. waitress enlightened me when she brought our drinks.

"Oh, that only happens in the death matches," she said,
smiling her friendly service smile, "but the audience usually
gives thumbs up because we wouldn't want to run out of

	PSYCHODROME
	125

gladiators. Besides, the new arrivals deserve a chance to learn,
don't they?"

"And the credit bankers who own their contracts deserve a
chance to collect their contingency fees," Breck said wryly.

"Well, certainly, sir," the waitress said, smiling at him with
unabated perkiness. "After all, they've purchased their
clients' debts and it's only fair that they have an opportunity
to receive a return on their investment."

"A fascinating way to put it," Stone said.

"Hey, wait a minute," said the waitress. "Aren't you

Rudy Breck, the psycho star?"

"I am Rudiger Breck, yes."

"And you're Stone Winters!" said the waitress. "I can't
believe it! Can I have your autographs?"

I was totally ignored, not being in the same league, but I
didn't mind at all. I minded even less when I saw what
happened as a result of this recognition. They signed their
autographs for her and she begged a kiss from Breck, which he
gave obligingly. He started to give it rather chastely, but she
turned it into a meal. The scene attracted some attention and
soon other people were aware of who we were--or at least of
who Rudy and Stone were--and, moments later, the game announcer
was telling everyone about it over the PA and having
them stand up and take a bow. Shortly after they resumed
their seats, the same waitress returned with our drinks. She
also returned with a small portable terminal, which she set on

the table in front of Breck.

"What's this?" he said.

"You've been challenged," she said. "I sn't it exciting?"

"Challenged?" Breck said. "What sort of nonsense is this?
I'm not fighting anyone, don't be ridiculous."

"Oh, you can't refuse!" she said, looking chagrined. "The
challenge is on all the terminals! What will people think?"

"I could not care less what people will think," said Breck,
pushing the terminal away. "I have no intention of beating up
some fool merely for the entertainment of this crowd."

"Isn't that what you do for a living, more or less?" a soft
voice said from directly behind me.

I turned to see the black-clad, bald stranger who had been
following us standing at my elbow. He was of average height,
but heavy and extremely muscular. He was built like a dray

126
	SIMON HAWKE

horse, massive and solid. His nose had been broken and
poorly set, as if he had done it himself. His features had a
chisled look, revealing Mongol or Tatar ancestry. He reached
for the terminal and turned it toward him. Deeply set, dark,
exotic eyes stared down at the screen.

"The challenge is from Michel Czer," he said, speaking in a
soft voice that seemed louder because of its timbre and precise
enunciation. "He has little reason to love the SS, and even less
to love you, Mr. Breck, who have succeeded so well since your
forced retirement."

Breck stared up at him, taking the stranger's measure.
"Who are you?" he said.

"My name is Nikolai Razin," said the stranger, pronouncing
it Rah-zeen. "A soldier of fortune by trade, a crystal
hunter by avocation. In this instance, I am something of a corporate
liaison."

"You mean Carson Sonoma is paying you to keep an eye on
us," I said.

"Yes, and paying me quite well, I might add," said Razin.

"What's this fellow Czer have against me?" Breck said.
"I've never even heard of him."

"He has obviously heard of you," said Razin. "As to what
he may have against you, I can only venture a guess, but it is
an educated one. Czer was once SS himself. He was badly injured
in a rocket blast. Enough so that he was of no further
use to the Special Service. Like yours, Mr. Breck, his was a
forced retirement. Czer is a cyborg. Strictly speaking, he's
barely even human. He was not quite as fortunate in civilian
life as you, hence his apparent resentment. He came here to
hunt crystal, but was not very successful. He became a
bankrupt and entered The Arena, where he became very successful
indeed. He has fought his way to solvency, but he is
not particularly popular. His fighting style is crude and his
personality abrasive. And he fights to win. The challenge, you
will notice, "--he turned the terminal screen toward
Breck--"is to the death."

-SEVEN-

Our table became the focus of a great deal of attention. Many
of the tables had portable remote terminals, so the customers
could keep track of the upcoming matches. This facilitated
betting. For the benefit of those who weren't following the upcoming
action via terminal, the game announcer informed
everyone of the challenge to "the celebrated Psychodrome
star, Rudy Breck" via PA.

We all heard Mondago's sepulchral voice simultaneously
through the interface. "This is an unscheduled interactive
gaming option, Mr. Breck. The home audience vote is overwhelmingly
in favor of your accepting the challenge. Apparently,
since your challenger is also formerly of the Special
Service and also biologically augmented, they do not consider
that you have an unfair advantage."

"Screw that," said Breck. "What they're considering is the
sight of blood, the ghouls." He sighed. "Very well, I shall
oblige them."

127

128
	SIMON HAWKE

Razin frowned. "I beg your pardon? Were you speaking to
me?"

"To our playermaster," Stone told him. "We've just been
informed through our interface that the psychodroids want to
see Rudy pick up the gauntlet."

"And you have no choice in the matter?" Razin said,
frowning.

"It all depends on how you look at it," said Breck. "Have a
seat, Mr. Razin, and show me how to respond to this challenge.''

Razin sat down beside Breck and turned the terminal
toward him. "What is your residence registration number?"
he said. Breck gave it to him and Razin punched it in. "You're
quite certain you want to go through with this?" he said. "I
was, after all, hired to watch over you and I feel I should inform
you that Czer has never lost a match. I know him well.
He is an unprincipled bastard."

"So am I, Mr. Razin," said Breck. "Go ahead, please."
"Very well. Would you please spell your name for me?"
Breck did and Razin punched it in, then punched in the ac-ceptence
of the challenge, which was confirmed in seconds
over the PA by the game announcer. We watched the odds

develop on the screen as bets were placed.

"You said he is cyborg," Breck said.

Razin nodded. "Both his arms are bionic, as are his legs and
hips. If I were you, I wouldn't waste my time in targeting his
groin. There is nothing there except some rather sophisticated
artificial plumbing. It's conceivable that you might damage
something, but you wouldn't slow him down much. He would
not feel any pain. His trunk is only partially organic. He's had
extensive nysteel reinforcement of his skeletal structure,
especially in the spinal area. His spinal cord was damaged and
it has been repaired and sheathed in nysteel. You won't break
his back, in other words. His ribcage is also nysteel and he has
an artificial voicebox implanted in a flexible nysteel trachea.
Don't bother trying to hit him in the throat; you will only
break your hand."

"Where the hell can he hit him?" I said. "The man's a
bloody robot!"

"I would advise you try for his nose," said Razin. "A hard
palm heel strike directed upwards should break it and drive the
splinters into his brain. He's obviously aware of his vulnera-

	PSYCHODROME
	129

bility there, so he will protect himself. You might consider trying
to blind him."

"You're very well informed," said Breck. "I don't suppose
you'd know who did the work on him by any chance?"

"So far as I know, it was all performed in a military
hospital," said Razin. "Is that any help?"

Breck smiled faintly. "Some," he said. "It tells me what
sort of modifications he doesn't have."

"I don't quite understand," said Razin.

"The service doesn't pay for extras," Breck explained. He
smiled and lifted his own artificial arm. "This was not military
issue."

"The odds are in," said Stone, looking at the screen. She
grimaced and looked up at Breck. They were six to one in the
challenger's favor.

"I thought you said he wasn't very well liked," I said.
"He's not," said Razin. "But why should people lose
money because of personal prejudice?" He reached for the
terminal and punched in a bet. He bet on Breck.

"I appreciate the gesture," Breck said dryly.

Razin shrugged. "At six to one, the payoff is well worth

the risk. Besides, I can afford to lose."
"What are the rules?" said Stone.
"What rules?" said Razin.

The game announcer let everybody know that as a result of
this "once in a lifetime" match-up, there would be no other
competitors in the arena. Breck and Czer would have it to
themselves.

"Are you well accustomed to zero G?" said Razin.

"Well enough," said Breck.

"I've seen Czer fight before," said Razin. "He will try to
work you all over the arena, from low G to zero G and back,
to throw off your reflexes and timing. Don't let him grab hold
of you. He could crush you easily. And watch out for his legs.
Nysteel bionics pack a powerful kick."

The announcer called for the contestants and Breck went
down to take his place in the arena. He went through the entrance
at the base and, a few moments later, we saw him enter
the dome, stripped to the waist, his nysteel arm gleaming. He
was in exceptional physical condition, every muscle standing
out in sharp relief. Then we saw his opponent for the first
time.

130
	SIMON HAWKE

Czer was a giant. He towered over Breck. His legs were
covered with skinsuit tights and he wore soft, lightweight
boots. His nysteel arms gleamed in the light of the arena. The
nysteel reinforcement of his chest made it seem huge and the
tremendous muscles he had developed to support it gave him
the appearance of a bull. His face had the too-tight smoothness
of plastic reconstruction and that somehow made him
seem even more of a robot. There was no character in it. The
features were handsome, but the expression was blank. His
head, like Razin's, was also shaved and he looked like a huge,
menacing mannequin. I would have expected him to move
ponderously, but the low gravity and his bionics gave him a
graceful fluidity that seemed incongruous, given his size.

Each man had been armed with a nysteel gladius, fashioned
after the ancient short sword of the Romans, and a small circular
shield that seemed to have little practical use. There was
no protective armor of any sort, or protective helmets. Each
wore identifying crossbelts, white for Czer and black for
Breck. They stood across the arena from each other and the
game announcer waited until there was silence. He announced
last call for bets, waited a moment or two, then said simply,
"Gentlemen, the match is to the death. You may begin when
ready."

He had hardly finished saying the last word when Czer
leaped straight up and out, angling toward the top and center
of the dome. He turned in midair, rebounded gracefully off
the rounded ceiling, and came down at Breck like a dive-bombing
eagle. Breck did a standing back somersault a second
before Czer reached him, struck against the wall with both
feet, somersaulted again in midair, and snap-kicked Czer as he
passed beneath him, sending him smashing into the floor of
the arena. Czer struck hard on his chest and bounced. He
recovered quickly, tucking up into a ball and spinning with
surprising speed, his sword held out away from him. The effect
was that of a buzz saw.

Breck kangarooed away from him toward the center of the
arena and the zero-G zone. Czer opened out of his tucked
position into something resembling a back dive, jackknifed,
and reversed motion. He floated down to the floor of the
arena lightly and landed on the balls of his feet. The crowd
was roaring their excitement. This wasn't some ungainly
match involving clumsy new arrivals. This was a battle be-

	PSYCHODROME
	131

tween two SS veterans who knew how to handle low gravity
and the peculiar conditions it created for combat. I was
mesmerized. I had never seen anything like it. Even Razin was
watching with rapt attention.

"He's good," said Razin, meaning Breck. "Good moves,
quick reflexes. I might even win my bet."

"What happens if you lose it?" Stone said harshly. "Isn't
your employer going to be upset with you for falling down on
the job?"

"I cannot be held responsible for choices you people make
of your own free will," said Razin. "If you should happen to
be gunned down in the street, Sonoma would be very angry
with me and rightly so. I would have failed to do my job. But I
warned Breck against this match and more than that I could
not do. This is his own responsibility. I do hope he wins,
though. I stand to make a tidy profit on my wager."

Stone didn't seem to appreciate his point. However, I
wasn't interested in their debate. I was fascinated by what was
happening in the arena. Both men had crossed swords only
half a dozen times. Like skilled knife fighters, they used utter
economy of motion, not making a single movement that
didn't have a purpose. In low to zero G, every movement produced
an immediate reaction. There wasn't the slash and flail
one might expect of swordplay. There was the wary, careful,
intense watching; the precise anticipation; the exacting movement;
the sailing through the air like seagulls on an updraft;
the tumbling like acrobats on a trapeze. It was like watching a
weirdly choreographed underwater ballet, only this dance was
lethal.

They would float toward one another, strike with their
swords, and rebound in opposite directions, sailing across the
zero-G zone slowly, almost imperceptibly losing momentum
as they reached the outer edges of the arena. They touched
down, rebounded, and came back at one another, attempting
to gauge the other's reaction. They would touch down on the
surface like bails bouncing in slow motion and circle each
other, watching for an opening, each trying to manuever his
opponent toward the central axis zero-G zone in a manner that
would place him at a disadvantage.

I began to appreciate the intricacy of the deadly game. It
was better to move quickly across the zero-G zone as part of a
sustained, controlled maneuver rather than be maneuvered

132
	SIMON HAWKE

into it unawares. The changes had to be subtle ones, as the entire
amphitheater was in a low-G zone close around the central
axis and most of the arena itself was zero G. Waitresses
kangarooed from table to table, delivering drinks. People
floated up out of the entrance to the club beneath the stage,
settled gently to the floor, and kangarooed to their seats as
two men whirled in midair in the domed arena above them,
locked in mortal combat. It was macabre and surreal.

The crowd was loving it. They were shouting, cheering, excited
by the uncertainty of the outcome. Neither man had yet
drawn blood and the crowd knew it would be sudden when it
came--there would be time for only one mistake, an irretrievable
one, and it would be all over. And then it happened.
Breck misjudged a move that Czer had made and tried
to recover, backpedaling and moving, apparently unintentionally,
too far into the zero-G zone. He started to float and
Czer made his move, committing totally in a fast leap--but
Breck flung his shield behind him violently, causing a sudden
reversal in direction so that his new course would take him and
Czer past one another. He swung his sword with his left hand
and as Czer parried him, he snikked out his blades and flicked
them across Czer's face

Czer screamed and' the crowd roared, drowning him out.
Blood seeped quickly from the five diagonal slashes across
Czer's face and floated away in globules as the man writhed in
the zero-G zone, covering his face with one hand and swinging
his sword around him violently with the other, blindly attempting
to keep Breck at bay. But Breck had anticipated the
momentum of Czer's leap and he rebounded from the wall,
ping-ponged off the ceiling of the dome, and came down
directly on top of Czer as he touched down in the low-gravity
zone at the outer edge of the arena. He trapped Czer's sword
between his blades and pinned him, legs locked around him,
his sword poised over Czer's face.

The crowd rose to their feet, screaming wildly, virtually
everyone indicating thumbs down. Breck looked at them for a
moment, then dropped his sword and gave Czer a quick, sharp
uppercut to the jaw. He pushed the limp body away to float
off across the arena. He then faced the game announcer's
booth and held up his nysteel hand, blades protruding.

"Mr. Breck's option for the nonlethal win," the game an-

PSYCHODROME
	133

nouncer said hurriedly over the PA. "Match to Mr. Breck."

"Why didn't you kill him?" Razin said when Breck returned
to the table.

"I did not feel like giving them the satisfaction," Breck
said. "Sorry if I disappointed you."

Razin shrugged. "Not me. I won my bet. The drinks are on
me tonight."

"You will be getting off easy," Breck said. "We will not be
staying. I had hoped to let the home audience experience the
pathetic spectacle of bankrupt new arrivals cutting each other
to pieces in your arena. Instead, they experienced the considerably
more pathetic spectacle of two crippled veterans performing
like monkeys before a crowd of fools. It was hardly
the statement I had hoped to make."

"You were only trying to help your friend, Colonel Renn,"
I said. "Unfortunately, our presence here can only serve to
romanticize the Fire Islands habitats. About the only way we
can discourage people from coming out here is to have something
highly unpleasant happen to us and that's something I'd
prefer to avoid."

"I keep underestimating you, O'Toole," said Breck, smil-

ing. "Remind me to--"

"You.t Breck!"

Czer approached our table, his face an ugly mask scored
with diagonal gashes and streaked with blood. He held a
plasma pistol. One eye was caked with blood, but the other

stared at us wildly. It became very quiet all around us.

"You humiliated me!"

Breck sat very still. So did we all.

"I merely tricked you," Breck said. "You fought well. You
deserve better than to waste your time in the arena, perform-iiig
for these people."

"Why didn't you kill me?" Czer said, his electronic voice
cracking. His hand holding the pistol was shaking. I suddenly
felt clammy all over.

"Why should I?" Breck said, keeping his voice even. "I

have nothing personal against you."

"I challenged you!"

"And I accepted. And we fought. I won, you Iost. It's over.
Why not leave it at that? Sit down and join us for a drink."

134
	SIMON HAWKE

"You humiliated me!" Czer said again. "The match was to
the death! I wasn't worth killing, was that it? I'm just a cripple
who's not good enough for you to kill! You should have killed
me!"

"Allow me to remedy the oversight," said Razin.

A plasma blast burned through from underneath the table
and slammed into Czer's chest. Not even nysteel can withstand
a point-blank plasma blast. Czer fell to the floor, the
stench of charred flesh and slagged nysteel washing over us.

"Damn you!" said Breck. "That was uncalled-for! I could
have handled it!"

"I only gave the poor fool what he wanted," Razin said.

"Or would you rather I had let him shoot you?"
"I don't need you watching out for me!"
"It's what I'm being paid for," Razin said.

"I'll double whatever Sonoma's paying you," said Breck.
"Just get away from me!"

"I'm afraid I can't do that," said Razin. "A man in my line
of work loses credibility if he switches sides anytime someone
offers him more money. When I hire on to do a job, I finish
it."

"You're defeating the entire purpose of why Sonoma hired
you," said Stone. "Our experience is transmitted back to Psy-chodrome
through the interface. The home audience knows
full well why Carson Sonoma hired you. What does that say
about the wonderful life-style in the Fire Islands?"

"Anyone who comes to the Fire Islands can hire a bodyguard,"
said Razin. "You can hire as many bodyguards as
you like, as many as you can afford. No one is attempting to
deceive your home audience, Miss Winters. Tell me, who is
safer, someone who spends his money paying taxes, a portion
of which goes toward paying policemen who will probably be
elsewhere when you really need them, or someone who can
take the same money he would pay as taxes back on Earth and
spend it on exclusive, twenty-four-hour protection? In your
case, the only difference is that you are receiving it free of
charge, since you are visiting celebrities."

"Does this protection we are being granted free of charge
extend to the planet surface as well?" said Breck.

"My job is over when you leave the Fire Islands," Razin
said. "My orders are to accompany you down to Draconis 9.
You would benefit from my experience as a crystal hunter."

	PSYCHODROME
	135

"I think we could do without the benefit of your experience,''
said Breck.

"It would be unwise to discard any advantage you might
have over an opposing team," said Razin. "I understand there
are several teams such as yours competing in this game scenario.
The Combine has assigned corporate liaisons to each of
them. Since I see one of my colleagues over there with those
three people, I assume they are your competition."

Breck looked quickly in the direction Razin indicated. Four
men were seated at a table several tiers above us. They were

watching us. One of them smiled and raised his glass.
"Smythe-Davies," Stone said flatly. "Damn."

Breck nodded back at them. "It seems we have lost our advantage,"
he said. "You recognize those men, O'Toole?"

I shook my head. "I was never a big fan of the game, remember?"

"Barry Smythe-Davies is the friendly-looking, dark-haired
man who toasted us," said Breck. "Don't let his amiable
looks deceive you. He is not very amiable at all. The other
dark-haired man is Vittorio Panatti. He is rather amiable, but
he does not let that get in the way of winning. And the large
redhead is John Devlin, one of the game's new players. I don't
know very much about him, but Panatti and Smythe-Davies I
know well. They should make a formidable team."

"Nice of Mondago to let us know they had arrived," I said.
"Mondago only passes on essential information," Breck
said. "Of course, what he thinks is essential may not coincide
with our view."

Smythe-Davies was coming toward our table, moving down
the aisle with practiced, low-G kangaroo leaps. He was tall
and slim, good-looking in a pretty-boy way, with an easy manner
and a bharming smile.

"Rudy! How nice to see you!" he said, sounding genuinely
pleased. He spoke with a British accent. "That was quite an
exhibition you put on. Truly impressive. And Stone, my old
darling. How long has it been?"

He bent down to kiss her, but she turned her face away.

He raised his eyebrows. "What, have I done something to
offend? Or have I been supplanted in your affections?" He
looked at me as he said that and winked. I hated him at once.
"You must be O'Toole," he said, offering his hand.

I stood and shook hands with him, though I didn't really

136
	SIMON HAWKE

want to. He was one of those people whose insincerity was so
obvious as to be insulting.

"Doing very well your first time out, I hear," he said.

"I'm trying my best," I said.

"That's the ticket. I was afraid we might have missed you
three. You jumped way out in the lead straight off. Had to
work damned hard to catch up with you. Been down to the
planet surface yet?"

"Not yet," said Breck.

"We were planning to take a shuttle down tomorrow morning.
Just got in, you know. Help to get a good night's rest.
Understand you've dealt with these Draconian creatures he-fore,
Rudy. Any advice, in the spirit of friendly competition?''

"Yes," Breck answered. "Stay here. Don't even bother
going down. You might never make it back."

"You seem to have survived no less for wear," Smythe-Davies
said with a grin. "Of course, we're not Special Service
hyhreeds, but I think we'll chance it. May the best team win,
eh?"

He left with a jaunty wave.

"Lays it on a bit thick, doesn't he?" I said.

"He's been playing that act so long, I don't think he knows
how to stop," said Stone.

"What was that bit about being supplanted in your affections?''
I said, in spite of having promised myself I wouldn't
ask.

"Nothing you need to be concerned about," said Stone.
"So there was something between you?"

She gave me a direct look. "Just sex," she said flatly.
"Smythe-Davies used to perform on the lust channels with
me. Is there anything else you'd like to know?"

Razin cleared his throat slightly and pretended to be interested
in the combat taking place in the arena. A group of
bankrupts was involved in a melee. After what they had just
seen, the audience was not terribly interested.

"No," I said uncomfortably. "I think that answers my
question."

"We should leave," said Breck. "It is a safe bet that those
three will be going down tonight. I see no reason to give them
a head start."

	PSYCHODROME
	137

"I can arrange passage down to the planet surface almost
immediately," Razin said. "I have already taken care of the
preliminaries and all the supplies."

"Thank you," Breck said. "That was very efficient of
you."

"Look, Breck," said Razin, "we don't have to like each
other, but perhaps we ought to clear the air. I think I can
understand the sympathy you may have had toward Czer, but
the fact is he has been trying to get himself killed ever since he
came here. Only some men don't die easily, even if they want
to. He was in a lot of pain, but he killed many people trying to
ease that pain. If I had not fired when I did, he would have
killed you and probably your friends as well. You were both
disabled and cashiered from the service, only you were able to
accept it and adjust. He never could. He challenged you
because he resented you and because there was a good chance
you would kill him and end his misery. I don't expect your
gratitude nor do I desire it, but if you don't wish to be a
hypocrite, dislike me for myself, not for having done my duty
as I saw it. Or is your own record in such things above
reproach?"

Breck gave him a long look. "No," he said after a moment,
"it is not. Your point is well taken. You have my apology."

"It's unnecessary," Razin said. "As long as we understand
each other. And I think we do. Now, if you don't wish to give
your competition a head start, we'd best be on our way. I see
they're leaving."

We weren't quite quick enough. The man the Combine had
assigned to Smythe-Davies's team was apparently as efficient
as Razin. They had shuttled down just ahead of us which
technically put them in the lead. I wondered if they too had
been briefed by Colonel Renn and if the time we'd spent
aboard Draconis Base had cost us, but it was pointless to dwell
on that. Razin assured us that the fact that they had gone
down before us didn't mean they'd find a crystal first. Besides,
getting down to the planet surface was the easy part.
Getting back up in one piece was quite another story.

Razin gave us his own briefing as we made the trip, but I
was having a hard time paying attention. I kept thinking about
Stone. For a while, back on Earth, we had achieved a real in-

13 8
	SIMON HAWKE

timacy that now seemed to have dissipated. Perhaps it was my
fault. It had been none of my business what she had done with
Smythe-Davies before she met me and I knew I shouldn't have
asked, but somehow I couldn't help myself. The answer I received
had only served me right.

The thought of the two of them together was repellent to
me, even though she had never made any secret of her past or
any excuses for it. She didn't owe me any explanations, but
she had talked about it with me back in that hotel room. She
had been honest with me and she hadn't asked me for an accounting.
I was the one who had been out of line. So why
couldn't I let go?

I was reminded of a guy I knew back when I was in the service.
We were both in the supply corps. He had fallen in love
with a prostitute and had asked her to marry him. He said it
didn't matter to him what she was; all that mattered was that
he loved her and she loved him. And, to the best of my knowledge,
she did love him. She had agreed to marry him, but he
couldn't seem to reconcile her being a prostitute with her being
his wife. What he said was one thing, but what went on inside
was something else. It ate away at him. I believe he really
loved her, but the responsibility for destroying that relationship
was solely his. She tried. She put up with it as long as she
could, but how do you live with someone who can't accept you
for what you are? And that includes accepting you for what
you were.

It wasn't enough that she stopped seeing other men as soon
as they made a commitment to each other. He wanted to know
how many men there had been. What kind of men were they?
Who were they? What had she done with them and how often
and for how much? Never mind that he had been one of those
men. I tried once, feeling very youthfully self-righteous, to
point out to him that a man who buys the services of a prostitute
is on pretty shaky grounds to condemn her for selling herself,
but it only drove him into a rage. It wasn't the same
thing, he insisted. He loved her. Well, didn't she love him?
Didn't she leave what was essentially a very lucrative profes*
sion to accept a much lower standard of living on a serviceman's
pay? Wasn't she faithful to him? He didn't know. How
could he know? What could fidelity mean to a whore? He
punished himself for falling in love with her, perhaps for having
gone to a prostitute in the first place. And, in so doing, he

	PSYCHODROME
	139

punished her and drove her away.

I remember feeling sorry for him and thinking, again with
very youthful self-righteousness, that he did not live a very
well-examined life. Love, I thought with the simplistic logic of
the inexperienced, was an absolute. You either loved someone
or you didn't. If you loved someone, you laid down the cards
and accepted everything that went along with it. Well, I still
believed that, but with the years had come the understanding
that love is not a very simple thing at all. It can be frighteningly
complex. It can trick you into all sorts of illogical rationalizations
because there's nothing very logical about being
in love. It can make you forget your own flaws and be less forgiving
of the flaws in others. It can cloud your perceptions
and' make you think reality is the way you think it ought to be
and not the way it is. And, perhaps the most deadly side effect
of that peculiar disease, it can make you think that because
you love someone or they love you, they ought to share your
world view.

The Stone Winters I knew was not the same Stone Winters
who had been the sex object of the lust channels. She had told
me as much and I should have known it without her needing to
tell me. She woke up one day and took a look in the mirror
and decided she didn't like what it showed her. She looked her
reflection squarely in the eye, accepted it, and proceeded to
make changes. And what I had just done back in The Arena
was tell her that those changes didn't count. It was an indefensible
position for me to take. As Razin had said to Breck, was
my own record in such things beyond reproach? If you are
fool enough to think it is, O'Toole, go ask Hakim Saqqara.

Thinking of Saqqara made me remember suddenly that I
was not entirely alone and I wondered, with a guilty embarrassment,
exactly how much of my self-recrimination would
be broadcast through the interface. And I wondered if Stone
would tune in to the rerun--always assuming we made it back
alive. I was having a hard time getting used to being a vehicle
for the vicarious entertainment of the masses. I kept forgetting
they were "there," if not truly inside my mind, then at least
accessing some of my feelings. And every time I remembered,
I felt as if I had dropped my pants in public.

Get your mind back on the game, O'Toole. It can kill you if
you don't pay attention. I had been aware, in a sort of offhand
way, of what Razin had been telling us as the shuttle

140
	SIMON HAWKE

dropped down to Draconis 9. Much of it was a repetition of
what had been in our game programming, but Razin either
didn't know that or he wasn't taking anything for granted.
Probably the latter, I thought, since his survival could easily
depend on ours.

There were two ground bases on Draconis 9, neither of
which could properly be called spaceports. The Combine had
paid for the construction, but they were maximum-security
military installations whose Special Service crews were rotated
every thirty days. If it had been up to the SS, there would have
been no ground bases at all, but since it wasn't their decision
and the shuttles had to have a place to land, the SS was forced
to supply the ground-base personnel. The frequent crew rotation
was necessary because of the constant strain of maintaining
the quarantine.

I could understand Colonel Renn's desire to do something
to discourage people from coming to the Fire Islands. He was
an SS hybreed, designed to cope with the most adverse conditions,
but the stress was getting to him. You could see it in his
eyes, the beginning of that haunted look that comes to gamblers
on a losing streak. I knew the look well--and the feeling,
Your stake keeps getting smaller and the best hand you've had
all night is a pair of threes. You know you should fold 'em and
get up from the table, but you can't. You tell yourself the odds
have to improve, it's mathematically impossible to keep being
dealt such lousy hands, but the cards don't seem to know that.
And that's what Renn was going through. There were humans
down there, from the original development team. And there
were humans down there who had come later, but who had
made mistakes and now could not return. And the Draconians
were learning from them. Learning how to be more human.
Sooner or later, the odds had to improve. A Draconian would
break the quarantine. Maybe even more than one. And then
what?

The shuttle touched down on the runway. And suddenly my
mouth was dry. I was afraid. I wondered if that would make
Hakim Saqqara happy.

-EIGHT-

We were taken to the headquarters building of Ground Base
Alpha, a thermoplast blockhouse situated in the center of the
compound. The shuttle had taken off immediately. It was too
late for any second thoughts. Well, not entirely too late. I
could still elect to remain at the ground base, but that wasn't
rea/ly an option, any more than coming to the Fire Islands had
been an option. I couldn't quit now. I had to play the hand
out.

We were each subjected to a minor surgical procedure involving
the subcutaneous implanting of miniature transceivers,
each with a specific unique coded frequency. Once we
had gone beyond the confines of the ground base, the only
thing that would enable us to return would be the transceiver
implants. If any one--or all three of us--came back and tried
to get into the compound, we would be scanned at a safe distance.
If there was no transceiver signal, there would be no
entry to the compound and no shuttle back up to Casino.

"And that's only the first step," Razin said as we made our
way across the compound toward the skimmer hangar.

141

142
	SIMON HAWKE

"There is a three-day quarantine during which you are kept
under maximum security and examined more minutely than
you have ever been examined in your lives. The military takes
no chances."

"Do the soldiers ever venture beyond the compound?"
Stone said.

Razin shook his head. "Colonel Renn is not very forgiving
of personnel who break regulations. He would treat something
like that as desertion under fire and exact the maximum penalty.
However, to my knowledge, there has never been a military
execution in the Fire Islands, at least not since Colonel
Renn took command. There have been other infractions, but
nothing very serious and never at a ground base. What happens
out there," he said, gesturing toward the countryside
beyond the compound, "may be technically under the jurisdiction
of the military, but in practice the authority of the SS
ends beyond the base perimeter. Here, we play by their rules.
Out there, it's anybody's game."

"Do you have any idea where Smythe-Davies and the others
might have gone?" said Stone.

"Crystal hunters are not in the habit of confiding in each
other when it comes to the locations of their favorite digs,"
said Razin wryly. "Cameron, the man assigned to your
friends, is one of the more secretive ones. Several enterprising
hunters joined forces and tried to follow him one time to find
out where he found his crystals. They never made it back."

"He'll be sharing the location of his dig with a lot more
than several crystal hunters this time," Stone said.

"Not very likely," Razin said. "Cameron will fly them
there in such a manner that it's highly doubtful they or anyone
in your home audience would be able to follow the course. He
knows these mountains well enough to find his way around
without benefit of course computer, which has only limited
uses in this terrain, anyway."

"Wouldn't that make it difficult for them to find their way
back to the ground base if anything happened to Cameron?" I
asked.

Razin grinned. "It might give them a good incentive to
make certain nothing happened to him."

We reached the skimmer hangar and Razin signed for our
transport vehicle. Moments later, we were lifting off in the
tiny delta-winged craft.

"The Combine supplies the skimmers," he said. "They lose

	PSYCHODROME
	143

them from time to time. They either crash or the hunters experience
some other no less fatal difficulty. Others forget in*
structions and foolishly attempt to land within the ground
base compound without following the prescribed approach
pattern." He shrugged. "Of course, if the SS has no chance to
scan the craft and control its entry, they have no choice but to
shoot it down. It pays to follow instructions."

"What happens if there aren't enough skimmers to go
around?" I said.

"That doesn't happen," Razin said. "You're not allowed
to go down to the surface and make a foray unless there's a
skimmer available for your use. So there is a waiting list for
surface excursions. Naturally, you being such important
guests, you received priority. The skimmers are fairly cheap to
build and the Combine has set up a small plant to manufacture
them in one of the other habitats. However, use of them is not
free. There is something called an excursion fee charged to
your account. The longer you keep the skimmer out, the
greater the excursion fee. Keeping the skimmer out too long
and not finding any fire crystal is a good way to go bankrupt
quickly. In that event, one of the credit bankers buys your
marker and the company receives its money and stops worrying
about you. You, on the other hand, have a whole new set
of problems."

"What happens if there's a glut on the market?" I said.
"Too many bankrupts, you mean?" Razin said.

"Yes. What happens if a credit banker doesn't buy up your
debts?"

"You might be better off," said Razin. "If the Combine is
in need of workers, then you are assigned to a job at the most
minimal rate of pay until you work off your debt. That's
called 'taking a company mortgage.' That could be preferable
to fighting in The Arena under a credit banker's contract.
However, if the Combine doesn't require any warm bodies at
the time, there is some fine print in the emigration agreement
that allows them to sell your contract, usually to a corporate
mercenary unit or even to the regular service. That may not
sound like such a bad deal, but in such cases, the enlistment
contract you 'agree' to undertake is for twenty years and a
percentage of your pay during that time is automatically deducted
and charged off to your account. It usually takes about
twenty years to pay off a debt that way, even if it's not a very
large one. Interest, you know."

144
	SIMON HAWKE

Stone seemed surprised. "Is that legal?"

"It is if you agree to it," said Razin. "And you do when
you sign up for the Fire Islands."

Breck smiled. "You're doing a wonderful public relations
job for the Draconis Combine," he told Razin.

"Your sarcasm is hardly to the point, Breck," Razin said.
"How much of this discussion do you think will reach your
home audience?"

Breck frowned. "What are you talking about?"

"I'm talking about reality, my friend. The reality of business
transactions. Did you really think the Combine would
give Psychodrome carte blanche out here? Or does it seem
more reasonable that they would stipulate--what would you
call it?--control over the final cut? What happens, really,
when your experiences are transmitted live? Isn't there, in
fact, a short delay to allow for what your people refer to as
enhancing?"

Breck was silent for a long moment. Stone glanced from
him to Razin.

"Can they do that?" I wondered.

"It occurs to me they can," said Breck. "There is nothing in
our contracts that says they can't."

"I don't understand," I said. "You mean they edit out
what we say if they don't like it? How can they? During live
tachyon transmission, the delay isn't long enough

"It is if all they have to do is substitute dialogue of their
own for what you're saying," Razin said. "They have enough
samples of your voice patterns to duplicate them electronically.
Working from any number of sample dialogue scripts
prepared in advance, it would be a fairly simple matter to
generate enhanced dialogue for you, in your own voices. You
see, I make a point of asking about such things. I like to know
all the details of the jobs I'm getting into. I wanted to make
certain that I would not inadvertently say the wrong thing. I
was assured there was no need for concern. For all I know,
your computers might be synchronizing my lip movements to
a rousing chorus of 'Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer' this very
minute. Give or take a moment or two."

"You mean they can literally have us saying whatever they
want us to say?" I said. "Have they ever really done anything
like that?"

"Not to my knowledge," Breck said slowly.

	PSYCHODROME
	145

Stone shook her head. "I never heard of it being done." She
paused. "Of course, I've only watched reruns of my own experiences
on occasion. Just because they've never done it with

"How do you know?" I said, an unpleasant thought occurring
to me.

"What do you mean, how do I know? I'd know it if they
changed what I said, wouldn't I? I was there!"

"What happens when you plug into a rerun?" I said. "How
do you know you're experiencing it on normal broadcast
channels? You either get the company to play it back for you
or you plug into a scheduled rerun on a psy-fi set that happens
to be in a room the company reserved for you. What if they're
transmitting the original, unenhanced recording to you and
another one to the home audience?"

"That young man is a Class A paranoid," said Razin, banking
the skimmer. "He'll probably go far."

Breck nodded. "You know, that possibility has never even
occurred to me in all the time I have played the game, not that
I have ever really cared one way or another until now. Yet it
makes sense. What made you think of that, O'Toole"

"Maybe Razin's right and I am a Class A paranoid," I said.
"On the other hand, I've had some experience with people
making it seem as if I'd done things I hadn't really done."

"Ah, yes," said Breck. "Your friend back on the Ginza
Strip. It strikes me that you've served quite an apprenticeship
for playing this game. You are not exactly an ordinary rookie,
are you?"

"I don't know why that should make me mad," said Stone,
"but it does. It's not as if Psychodrome hasn't already used
my mind and body, but somehow the idea of having my words
changed really bothers me."

"But are they truly your words, Miss Winters?" Razin said.
"What I mean is, in a sense, aren't you actually playing a part,
much as any other actress? The experience you broadcast may
be genuine, at least for the most part, but can you honestly say
that you are communicating with your audience? There is no
real interchange, is there? Rather, you are performing for
them, are you not? Playing a part that happens to be Stone
Winters, but is nevertheless a role. So what if they change the
script? It does not change you, except in the eyes of your home
audience, who don't really know you anyway, do they?"

146
	SIMON HAWKE

Stone stared at him, then looked at me. "Did you understand
what he just said?"
"I'm afraid so," I replied. "That's what worries me."
Razin chuckled. "Don't let it concern you, Miss Winters.
After all, it's only show business, right?"
"I'm not sure I care for your tone, Razin," she said.
"My apologies," he said. "I did not mean to sound condescending.
I suspect the only reason O'Toole and I understand
each other is that we are both members of the same club. We
are both cynics. And we are both paranoid, traits which I
would say auger well for our survival. Especially here on
Draconis 9, where you never know for sure if something is
what it seems to be. Rather like your Psychodrome hallucin-act,
I should think. Who knows, perhaps this is a Psycho-drome
hallucinact. Perhaps I'm not even really here. For all
you know, I might be a computer simulation."
"Razin, give it a rest, okay?" I suggested. "My hold on
reality is tenuous enough, thank you."
Razin smiled. "Really? Well, in that case, as some ancient
personage once said, 'You ain't seen nothin' yet.'"
The skimmer suddenly plunged down into a mountain
chasm and banked sharply, barely missing the rock walls. For
an instant I had a crazy flash of djit vu, as if the scene back
on the Ginza Strip was being replayed in a mountain gorge instead
of an urban maze, with Razin flying the skimmer instead
of Kami piloting her tiger-striped scooter.
"Razin!" Stone shouted. "Are you crazy? What the hell are
you doing?"
"Attempting to lose your friends," said Razin. "In case it
has escaped your notice, we are being followed. I assume
that's Cameron behind us, flying the other skimmer."
I twisted around in my seat and saw another skimmer
several hundred yards behind us and closing fast. Razin
banked sharply again and rolled the tiny craft. I felt my body
strain against the seat harness. We were hurtling past rock
walls at an incredible speed, coming so close to them that it
seemed as if at any moment we'd scrape against an outcropping
and one of the wings would shear off, but Razin was an
accomplished pilot. Cameron, apparently, was no less skillful.
The other skimmer stayed right on our tail.
We played tag with Cameron among the rocks, zooming
through the mountainous terrain like tiny fish darting among
coral. I had lost all sense of direction. We rolled and banked

	PSYCHODROME
	147

'so quickly and so many times, I wasn't even certain about up
and down anymore. Everything became a fast, disjointed
series of blurred images--shrubs and trees and rocks and sky
and flashes of a river undulating far below us. Perhaps it was
thrilling as all hell for the home audience, but I was feeling incredibly
nauseated. ,They would "enhance" that out, no
doubt.

"We appear to be evenly matched," said Razin. "I can't
seem to shake him. I was hoping I could make him crash."

"I was hoping we wouldn't," said Stone. "Let them follow
us. What difference does it make?"

"It makes quite a difference," Razin said. "Why should
Cameron take them to his crystal dig when he can latch onto
our tail and follow me to mine? I would prefer not to share its
location with him. Unlike Smythe-Davies's team and yourselves,
he would be able to find it agaiff on his own. I'd rather
he didn't do that."

"Lead him away from it, then," said Breck. "Set down
somewhere and we'll settle it."

"I was leading him away from it," said Razin. "However, I
would prefer not to set down first if I can avoid it. We would
present a bit too tempting a target on the ground."

"We could just as easily return the fire," Breck said, patting
his pistol in its holster.

"True, but why take unnecessary risks?" said Razin.

Stone glanced at him in astonishment. "You're kidding.
After the way you've been flying this thing, you can say
that?"

Razin shrugged. "I haven't taken any real risks yet. However,
Cameron is beginning to annoy me. Let's see if this
won't dissuade him."

He pulled the nose of the skimmer up sharply and it climbed
vertically, then looped around and went back in the opposite
direction. Cameron had followed, executing the same maneuver,
and now we were still in the same relation to each other,
only heading back in the opposite direction--whichever direction
that was; I was more thoroughly lost than a schizophrenic
mouse in a maze. Razin put the skimmer in a forty-five-degree-angle
dive, then abruptly cut the engines. I went cold.
all over.

"Oh, God," I said, my voice sounding somehow very far
away. "We're going to die."

"I sincerely hope not," Razin said, "but I confess there is a

148
	SIMON HAWKE
chance of it, especially if you continue to distract me." "O'Toole," said Breck quietly. "Shut up, please."
The skimmer dropped down in a very fast, controlled glide.
All I could hear was the sound of wind rushing past the wings.
I had no idea what Razin was planning and I wasn't sure I
wanted to know. I was even more sure I didn't want to know
when I saw what he intended, but by then it was too late. I
knew. I felt Stone's fingers digging into my shoulders and I
tried to concentrate on that feeling, as if it would block out the
unreasoning terror that welled up inside me when I saw the
opening of the cavern in the side of the mountain directly
ahead of us. The cavern mouth was coming up fast. Very, very
fast.
"Razin..." I said, my voice a horse whisper, "you're not going torn''
Stone's hand reached around from behind me and covered
my mouth.
We plunged into the mouth of the cave.
Razin hit the engines.
I would have closed my eyes, but it was already so dark inside
that cavern that I couldn't see a thing. I kept waiting for the inevitable impact, but it didn't come. The engines braked
us and we slowed gradually. I became aware that we were
headed downward, going deeper inside the mountain. I still
couldn't see a thing. I glanced quickly toward Razin, expecting
to see at least the soft glow of the instrument panel, but
there was nothing. Pitch blackness. The crazy son of a bitch
was flying blind inside a mountain. If Stone's hand hadn't
been covering my mouth, I would have whimpered.
We turned--turned!--and I felt the almost imperceptible,
gentle scraping of the skimmer's undercarriage on something
beneath us.
"Damn," said Razin softly, and then he hit the lights.
Even Breck caught his breath.
We were inside a mammoth cavern, so huge it looked as if
the entire mountain had to be hollow. It made me think of
sailing through some gigantic undersea grotto in a tiny submarine.
Gargantuan stalactites hung down from overhead like
saurian teeth and we flew between stalagmites the size of skyscrapers.
Birds or bats or some kind of creatures with wings
darted through the cavern in clusters, avoiding the bright
lights of the skimmer. A number of them came extremely

	PSYCHODROME
	149

close, but didn't strike us, veering off at the last instant. I saw
that they were insects of some sort, with darkly glinting
carapaces and antennae and multitudinous legs. They flew
with a sort of clicking sound not unlike the sharp, professional
shuffling of cards.
I could not -et over the sheer size of the place. I had been
overwhelmed by the grandeur of the mountain ranges of
Draconis 9 and made to feel insignificant by their immensity,
but nothing had struck me with such force as the experience of
being in that cavern system. It was like having been swallowed
up into the giant belly of a leviathan. The lights of the skimmer
revealed shockingly vivid colors--greens brighter than a
parrot's plumage, blood reds, pastel pinks and browns in
many shades, dove grays, and bright yellows--ail sparkling
with dustings and thick veins of pyrites and crystalline formations.
"My God," said Stone softly and it was not until she spoke
that I realized she still had her hand clamped over my mouth. I
made a sound against it and she withdrew it, mumbling, "Oh,
sorry."
I turned to Razin. "You are an absolute maniac," I said.
"You're probably right," he said casually. "It was risky
coming through without the lights, but I wanted to give
Cameron a bit of a turn. He evidently didn't have the nerve to
follow us in."
"It was an impressive maneuver," Breck said. "How many
times did it take you to learn the route through the cavern
mouth so well?"
"I've done it dozens of times," said Razin, "but that was
the first time I've ever tried it without lights. It was a bit of a
close scrape there at the end."
"You want to tell me again what you said about unnecessary
risks?" I asked.
Razin shrugged. "I felt reasonably confident that I could do
this. Besides, you wanted a dramatic experience for your home
viewers, didn't you?"
"They certainly got that," said Stone. "Is this the place
where you get your fire crystals?"
"Not exactly," Razin said. "When I first found this place, I
was convinced I would find fire crystal here, but after exploring
this cavern system fully, I found almost every sort of
mineral and crystalline substance native to Draconis except

150
	SIMON HAWKE

fire crystal. Still, I like to come here."

"I can see why," said Breck. "It is magnificent. How did
you happen upon it?"

"Entirely by accident," said Razin. "I crashed in this vicinity
on one of my first trips out. Stupid, really. I had no
business attempting to navigate the gorge without a great deal
more experience. I was fortunate and survived the crash, but
that left me on foot at the bottom of the gorge, with no way
out. I figured I was done for. I was attempting to decide
whether I should simply kill myself or die trying to stay alive
as long as possible. Purely an intellectual exercise, really. I had
always wondered what I would do in such a situation and now
that I was confronted with it, I wanted to give it the fullest
consideration. Then it started to rain. I decided that I might as
well remain dry and reasonably comfortable while I debated
the question, so I started to look for shelter. And then I
spotted the entrance to the cavern."

The skimmer had slowed so that it was largely hovering,
moving forward very slowly. Razin seemed to be following a
specific course through the giant cavern.

"It wasn't easy to climb up to it, but I had become curious,''
he continued. "You can't see the cavern entrance from
the air until you're almost right on top of it. You can see it
clearly from the ground, but it's quite hard to get to and there
isn't any good landing site below it or any reason why anyone
should want to land there. The only practical way to get inside
it is the way we came--though not necessarily in exactly the
same manner, of course. The cavern mouth is deceptive. It
looks barely wide enough to admit a skimmer--and it is--but
it widens out almost immediately, allowing plenty of room to
maneuver a small craft such as this. If you don't know your
way, the sudden downward slope that occurs just inside the
cavern mouth can be quite dangerous. If Cameron had followed
us, chances are he would have crashed, even as good a pilot
as he is."

"How did you get back?" said Stone. "You said there was
no way out of the gorge except by air..."

"There is one other way," said Razin, "and we are about to
take it."

Gently, he set the skimmer down, hovering it first, then
turning it slowly about its axis as it descended with a diminishing
whine of its engines. There was a slight bump on the
undercarriage as it touched down and then he retracted the

PSYCHODROME I $1
canopy. I felt a damp, cool breeze. It was eerily silent in
the cavern, a silence broken only by the chittering flight of the
insectlike creatures that nested up in the stalactites.
I pointed at several of them flying past us overhead. "Are
those things dangerous?"
"Damned.if I know," Razin said.
"I thought' you were supposed to be our consulting expert
on this junket," I said.
Razin shrugged. "I don't bother them and they don't
bother me. It pays not to get too close to the indigenous life
forms on this planet. One never knows for sure what they
might be." He smiled.
We climbed out of the skimmer and stood on the ledge
where Razin had set it down. He took a lantern out of the
cockpit and shined it out over the ledge, giving us a breathtak-
ing view of the cavern as he played the wide beam across it.
"Beautiful, isn't it?" he said.
"/-lave you ever encountered the Draconians" asked
Stone. ·
"Oh, yes," said Razin. He did not amplify.
"And?" she persisted.
"I am, as I have already told you, a paranoid," he said. "I
try to keep my distance. If they fail to respect that, I generally
shoot them."
"Even if they have shapechanged into human form?" she
said.
"Especially if they have shapechanged into human form,
Miss Winters."
"/-Iow do you know it's not actually a human?"
"I'm not terribly concerned with that," said Razin. "I have
survived as long as I have out here because I watch out for
myself. If I warn someone to keep their distance and they seem
disinclined to listen to me, then I figure that's their problem. I
don't lose any sleep over it."
"You must have an interesting social life," I said.
"Down here, it's each man for himself," said Razin. He
smiled at Stone. "Or each woman for herself. And this would
be the appropriate time to caution you about keeping very
careful track of one another. Do not get out of one another's sight. Especially do not get out of my sight. A Draconian
could assume your shape in a matter of moments. If I'm not
absolutely certain you are who you appear to be, I may
develop some acute anxiety."

152
	SIMON HAWKE

"So we use the buddy system, is that it?" I said. "Want I
should hold your hand?"

"Getting nervous, O'Toole?" Razin asked.

"Why, does it show?"

He grinned. "We may not even encounter any shape-changers.
Personally, I would not mind that a bit, but I'd hate
for you to feel cheated."

"Oh, I think I could handle it," I said.

Razin reached into his pack and passed out several small,
self-contained breathing masks designed to fit over the nose
and mouth. "These are extractor masks," he said. "They concentrate
the available oxygen in the air. You'll need them. If
you haven't already experienced some trouble breathing, you
soon will. We will be going to an elevation of approximately
sixteen thousand feet. In Earth's atmosphere, this would be
comparable to somewhere between eighteen and twenty thousand,
so conserve your energy."

We followed him up a steep incline. The passage was narrow,
barely wide enough to allow us to pass in single file.
Several times, it narrowed so sharply it was necessary to turn
sideways and squeeze through. It seemed to be getting colder.
I wasn't sure how far we had walked or how long it took. All I
knew was that my out-of-shape leg muscles didn't like it very
much. It didn't take long before I felt the twitching caused by
lactic acid buildup in the muscles. I became more aware of my
feet, calves, knees, and hips than I had ever been before. The
deficiencies of urban living. I wondered what it was that made
people want to to out and hike in mountains for the fun of it.
Doubtless, they didn't experience such discomfort. They practiced
doing it until it no longer bothered them, which struck
me as being similar to bashing your head against the wall on
the theory that sooner or later you wouldn't notice the pain
anymore.

After a while, I felt the breeze grow stronger. Soon there
was light up ahead. We came out finally into what I first
thought was a box canyon, but then I realized it was the crater
of an ancient volcano, the ridge reaching high into the clouds.
We were in the caldera. The mouth of the extinct volcano was
shrouded in mist and most of the crater was filled by a large
lake. The light was diffused by the clouds and it was like
standing in a thick fog.

"This is where I find my crystal," Razin said.

	PSYCHODROME
	15 3

"Aren't you worried about giving the location away?" said
Stone. "Couldn't someone find this place knowing they were
looking for an extinct volcano at about--what was it you
said--sixteen thousand feet?"

"I'm not terribly concerned about it," Razin said. "First of
all, as I said before, it's highly unlikely anyone would have
been able [o follow the course I flew to get there, except an experienced
crystal hunter such as Cameron. From the way we
went down without our engines, Cameron probably thought
we crashed. We disappeared from his view among the lower
rock outcroppinngs and if he tried to follow us down, he may
have spotted the cavern entrance, but it would be unlikely
unless he knew exactly what he was looking for. It's only
clearly visible from the ground and from an altitude roughly
parallel to it. Even if he spotted it, he'd have to know exactly
how to navigate the cavern mouth and if he was able to do
that, it would probably take him weeks of exploring the cavern
system before he found the tunnel leading up to the caldera. If
anyone tried to find it from the air, they'd be hard pressed,
because there is always cloud cover. It would be like diving
into water without knowing what the depth was or if there
were rocks just beneath the surface. Besides, there are quite
literally hundreds of volcanos on Draconis 9, some extinct,
some dormant, and some active. The records are by no means
complete. I found this place purely by chance. Someone else
trying to find it from the record of your experience would have
a difficult time of it."

Breck was looking all around at the sides of the caldera.
"How did you get out of here the first time, after you crashed
your skimmer?"

"I climbed," said Razin.

"Up these walls?"

"It took me over a week to climb up out of here," he said.
"Most of that time was spent scrambling, looking for hand-and
footholds. I would get partway up and then there would
be nowhere else to go, no purchase whatsoever. I would be
forced to climb back down the same way and start again, looking
for another way out. It was not the most pleasant experience
I've ever had, but several pocketfuls of fire crystal
kept me going. I've been coming back here to get more ever
since."

"Where do you find them?" I said.

154
	SIMON HAWKE

"Sometimes you will find a vein of the crystal," Razin said.
"That is comparatively rare. More often, you might find
pieces of a shattered crystalline formation, either lying around
loose as rubble or on the bottom of stream beds. But the rarest
find of all is what is known as an intact formation."

He moved over to a large outcropping of dark volcanic rock
and, unexpectedly, plunged his fingers into it, as if he were
tearing a hunk of bread from a giant loaf. The thick dried mud
caking the rock crumbled easily, revealing the shimmering
clusters of faceted crystal formations underneath.

Stone stared at it with disbelief. "That whole thing is..."
"An intact formation of fire crystal, Miss Winters," Razin
said, "standing over twelve feet tall and six feet in diameter,
extending an undetermined distance beneath the surface. It
was brought up from below during the last eruption, but it was
never carried out over the rim. I imagine it was deposited here
as the lava subsided and then, when it cooled and the caldera
formed, the lava hardened into a basaltic outer skin over the
formation. It took me months to carefully chip it away from
this one formation. This entire caldera is full of them. They
are all around you. I've found thirty-seven so far."

Stone gasped. Breck stared at Razin with utter disbelief. My
mouth had gone completely dry.

"You fool," said Breck, in a low voice. "Do you have any
idea what you've done?"

"I have created a legend," said Razin, smiling. "A legend
of a place where, if you could only find it, you would discover
enough fire crystal to make you rich beyond your wildest
dreams. And it is a reality, not just some tale told by drunken
crystal hunters. Through you, millions of people have seen it,
experienced it for themselves."

"And since you're the only one who knows how to find this
place," said Breck, "you're going to be a marked man for the
rest of your life."

"Perhaps that would concern me a great deal," Razin said,
"if I were a man." Before any of us could react, his weapon
was in his hand and pointed at us. "Please make no sudden
moves. I honestly have no wish to kill you, but I will not
hesitate to do so if you force me."

-NINE-

"Is this some sort of joke?" said Breck. "If it is, it is not
amusing."

"Nikolai Razin is dead," the ambimorph said. "But in a
sense, he's also here. I have assumed his personality--his
memories, his thought patterns, his bioplasm--and what you
see before you is indistinguishable from the original, except it
is not strictly human."

"I don't believe it," Stone said. "You were on Casino with
us. You haven't been out of our sight since we left. The
transceivers--"

"Are a stopgap measure at best," the Draconian said. "The
transceiver implants prevented me from simply assuming any
human form and attempting to enter your ground bases by
passing myself off as a human. They do not, however, prevent
me from taking the place of a specific human if I am able to
kill him."

"How?" I said.

"We survive by assuming the forms of other creatures," the
Draconian said. "We duplicate them down to the last detail.

155

156
	SIMON HAWKE

In this manner, we are able to live as they live. Possessing their
interior organs, their biochemistry, we are able to adapt to
their life functions. We can breathe as they breathe, feed as
they feed. Our adaptability has always been the key to our survival.
But in what you would call our natural state, we feed in
the same manner as the unicellular protozoans native to your
planet."
"You mean you absorb your food like an amoeba?" I said.
Suddenly I understood and I felt sick. "My God. You ingested
him."
"You seem horrified, O'Toole," said the Draconian. "And
yet you humans saw nothing wrong with hunting us for food.
In the form we had adopted, we were even considered something
of a delicacy by many of those who first came here,
which is more than I can say for the taste of human flesh. I
became quite ill after consuming Razin. It is an experience I
have no wish to repeat, so you can rest easy On that count."
The shapechanger grimaced wryly. "I promise not to eat you.
I killed Razin only because it was necessary. He tried to kill
me. Consuming him was the 0nly way I could absorb his
transceiver implant into my own system."
"Then you've broken the quarantine," said Breck. "But by
telling us, you have also alerted our authorities."
"Which was precisely my intention," the Draonian said. "I
have no wish to harm you. You are my vehicles for communicating
with the human race, through your psych-fidelity
network. I am aware that your playermaster, Tolliver Mon-dago,
is monitoring your experience along with officials of the
Draconis Combine. Mr. Mondago, I have information which
will be of vital interest to the human race, but I shall divulge
none of it unless I have your assurance that this transmission
will not be interfered with by the Combine. I await your
reply."
I held my breath, waiting for Mondago's contact. It did not
come right away. The tension increased as the silence lengthened.
Finally, Mondago's voice came to us across the vast
distance of space.
"Forgive the delay," he said, his well-bottom voice sounding,
in my mind, perfectly calm and controlled. "/t was
necessary to have the Combine observer removed from the
game control center. He became quite agitated and wanted to
censor the transmission, insisting it would cause widespread
panic. He may be right, but under the circumstances, I feel

	PSYCHODROME
	157

that I must override him on the grounds of the public's right to
know."

I didn't think Mondago was especially concerned about the
public's right to know, but the ratings would definitely be on
his mind. He was speaking to the telepathic shapechanger
directly, through us.

"You have my assurance that there will be absolutely no interference
with the transmission of the players' experience.
Your message will be broadcast live over the psy-fi network,
for which I accept full responsibility. In return, I trust you Will
remember your promise not to harm my players. Now, what is
it you want?"

I was surprised by Mondago's apparent concern for our
welfare until I realized that he was probably not speaking for
our benefit alone, as he usually did, but for broadcast purposes
as well.

"We want only to survive," said the shapechanger. "We
Draconians, as you call us, do not wish to be perceived as
dangerous, xenophobic monsters, yet we are all too aware that
we will probably be portrayed in that light. When you humans
first arrived here, we did not engage in any hostilities against
you. We were peaceful, until humans began to kill us indiscriminately,
to hunt us for food. We were forced to act in a
manner that would ensure our survival, which has always been
dependent upon our ability to assume what you would call
protective coloration to adapt to our environment. When confronted
by a predator, it is our first instinct to take that
predator's form. We began to take human form instinctively
at first, merely to protect ourselves, but also to learn
everything we could about this new predator which had appeared.
The result was a form of mutation for which, in a
curious way, we should probably thank you.

"You are the most advanced species we have ever encountered
and through our defensive transmogrification into human
form, we evolved into something much more than what
we were. We understood that, to you, we were initially
nothing more than animals and that it was not unnatural for
your predatory instincts to cause you to act as you did. We
also understood that among many of you, there was considerable
regret for your mistake. Yet, while there may have
been regret, there was also fear. Fear which would have led to
the genocide of our species, only our nature renders us difficult
to detect. Mr. Breck, as one of the soldiers sent here for

158
	SIMON HAWKE

that purpose some time ago, can testify to that.

"A quarantine was the only logical alternative," the shape-changer
continued, "but there was something here you humans
wanted and a quarantine--a real quarantine--would
have denied you access to it. Fire crystal means nothing to us.
We have no use for it. We would gladly have given you all you
wanted, but you chose instead to come and take it for
yourselves, as if it were your right to do so. We would not
have objected to that, either, only your greed caused you to
come here and kill one another for it and your fear caused you
to kill us as well. If you had your way, you would have wiped
us out, not just because you were afraid of us, but because this
planet could be terraformed and we were in the way. You have
done this even with those of your own kind.

"Well, we have learned much from you and one of the
things we have learned is how to deal with you in terms you
would understand. We want no more humans on our world.
You may keep your ground bases and use them to negotiate
with us for fire crystal. You may think of them as embassies.
But we do not want you to set foot beyond the confines of
those ground bases and we will not give you fire crystal for
nothing. We have learned that humans value only that which
costs them dearly. And to strengthen our negotiating position,
we will appeal to your fear.

"We have broken your quarantine. We succeeded in breaking
it some time ago. The method is not a very pleasant one for
us, but it has proven effective. Even as I speak, some of us are
in Casino and the other habitats which comprise the Fire
Islands. Some of us have gone on to your colonies and even to
your home world, Earth, where we can easily pass as human
and where, just as easily, we can reproduce.

"We can live among you peacefully as humans," the shape-changer
said, "even as there are now humans living peacefully
with us, tralped here by your own quarantine. Or we can embark
upon a program of terrorism the like of which your
world has never seen before. It is not something we wish to do,
but you have shown us how and we are uniquely suited to it.
The choice is yours. We have had enough of being
slaughtered. That is all I have to say. I have now accomplished
what I had set out to do."

The Draconian looked at each of us in turn, gauging our
reactions, as if he were trying to guess from our thoughts how

	PSYCHODROME
	159
the rest of the human race would respond upon hearing this
ultimatum.
Breck stood looking at him. He walked over to the crystal
formation, removing his glove as he went, snikked out his
blades, and struck the formation a sharp blow at the bottom
of a cluster. An obelisk-shaped crystal broke off and dropped
into his other hand. He held it up briefly and looked at the
fires dancing within the perfectly formed, natural facets.
"We have also accomplished what we set out to do," he
said. "Now we had best be on our way."
The shapechanger hesitated a moment, then nodded and
bolstered his pistol. "I will take you back."
"I would not advise that," Breck said. "You I, ave delivered
an ultimatum that will not be received easily or well. If the
Combine's representative had time to get off a tachyon transmission
to Casino, you will never leave the ground base alive.
They will want to interrogate you thoroughly and they will not
be particular about how they get their answers."
"It is a risk I was prepared to take," the Draconian said.
"Someone needs to represent our case to your people."
"What if our people decide to kill you?" Stone said.
The Draconian gave a very human shrug.
Part of me was wondering why we were concerned about his
safety. This alien had just threatened the human race with terrorism. Yet another part of me--the part I tried to focus
on--was reminding me that we were the aliens here and that
we had been the ones who taught him. I tried to imagine how I
would have felt if the Draconians had come to Earth to claim
it for their own. How would I have felt if they had considered
us nothing more than animals? What would my reaction have
been if they had started hunting us for food? Would I have
been content to have them quarantine my world?
One of the first and most important steps in any conflict in
our history was always the dehumanization of the enemy. An
Indian became a wog; a Native American became a redskin;
an Asian became a nip, a gook, a chink, a kraut, kike, wop,
spic, nigger.., it was all the same, one category, one subrace,
one something-less-than-human which made it easier to oppress
or even kill. In this case, it was really easy because there
was no question of humanity involved. This time, we were
really faced with other and the emotions brought into play
keyed off "us" and "them."

160
	SIMON HAWKE

Part of me was emotionally outraged at the Draconian's
belligerence and part of me kept pulling in the reins, reminding
me that we had taught them this. "We have learned how to
deal with you in terms you would understand," the Draconian
had said. It was infuriating to be told what terms we would
understand, it sounded arrogant and condescending, yet how
was it possible to dispute knowledge gained through telepathic
contact? How could it be dismissed as arrogance? What was
arrogant was that we had imposed our sensibilities and our
perceptions upon another race of beings, we had even had the
arrogance to name them after the human who had "discovered''
their world.

And then there was the question of responsibility. By coming
to their planet, we had changed them. Our interaction with
them had forced a mutation. They had learned, been forced to
learn, to become like us, to look like us and act like us and
think like us. I looked at "Razin" and saw the Razin that had
been, the human template for the new model I confronted.
The mimicry was perfect, both inside and out. Inside that
chet there was now a heart that beat just like a human heart,
lungs that breathed like human lungs. Cut him and he might
bleed. Would a chemical analysis reveal a composition unlike
that of human blood or was this so plastic a life form that even
the molecular structure of human blood could be duplicated?
Could they even be what they were if their molecular structure
were not plastic, radically different from anything we had ever
encountered before? How much was really known about
them? Did they merely take the form of humans or did they, in
fact, become human? If so, then maybe they were better at it
than we were. The real Nikolai Razin would probably have
killed his enemy. This one had chosen not to.

None of us spoke as we made our way back through the tunnel
to the cavern where we had left the skimmer. There was a
lot to think about. Our experience had become much more
than simply an entertainment for the masses. I wondered how
the news would be received back home. I thought I had a
pretty good idea of the answer and that made me afraid.

Breck and the Draconian were in the lead. Stone walked
directly ahead of me. I suddenly felt an overpowering need to
reestablish the closeness there had been between us. I reached
out and took her by the arm. She stopped and turned to face
me for a moment. In the darkness of the tunnel, we could
barely see each other.

	PSYCHODROME
	161

"Stone," I said, speaking in a voice not much louder than a
whisper, "I just wanted to say.., about what I said back in
Casino..."

I felt her fingers briefly touch my lips and then, a moment
later, I felt her lips brush mine. Then she turned and continued
down the tunnel.

That soft contact, so brief and yet so full of meaning, was
more important to me than anything we could have said to one
another. Sometimes there are things you have to say that can't
be said with words. I wondered if paranoia was a trait unique
to humans. It was hard enough, among yourselves, to develop
trust. It was hard enough to just believe in someone. Does this
person really think well of me? Are these people really my
friends? Do they really like me? Does she really love me; does
he really understand me or is there some secret truth being
kept from me? What is he really thinking? What does she
really want? Wasn't what psychologists called being "well-adjusted"
actually nothing more than a functioning method
ology for dealing with our insecurities? How "well-adjusted"
would we be now, knowing we had been invaded? To all those
other questions directed at seeking reassurance would now be
added a terrifying further doubt--is this person really human?
And how would anybody really know?

We reached the end of the tunnel and stepped out into the
giant cavern. The skimmer sat on the ledge just below us. I
wanted to believe that none of it had really happened. We had
come here to obtain a chunk of fire crystal and we had done
that. Now we would leave. Would the game go on as before? I
didn't like the rule changes. I didn't want to play. I wanted to
yell out that universal, wonderful, childlike demand, "Do
over!" It was an unacceptable reality. I didn't want to deal
with this.

We were almost to the skimmer when the shots were fired.
The first plasma blast slammed into a rock formation just in
front of us, between us and the skimmer. Superheated rock
chips and chunks of molten crystal flew like shrapnel. The second
one, coming fast on the heels of the first, blasted the
cavern wall above and to the left. The entire wall came down
in an avalanche of rock and dust. Something struck me and I
went down. I heard someone shouting, but it was drowned out
in the echoes of the plasma blasts and falling rocks. I covered
my head with my arms, expecting at any moment to be
crushed beneath tons of rock.

162
	SIMON HAWKE
I was dazed. There was a ringing in my ears. I wasn't sure
how much time had passed, if I had lost consciousness or not.
I felt the wetness in my eyes before I felt the pain. Blood was
trickling down from a gash in my forehead above my left
eyebrow. My right shoulder felt numb. Rock and crystal dust
was everywhere. I tried to breathe and it triggered off a spasm
of coughing.
The first thing I saw as the dust slowly settled was the skimmer,
half on and half off the ledge, crushed beneath fallen
boulders. I couldn't see any of the others. There was a huge
pile of rubble in front of me. I had just missed being buried
beneath the stone. Stone
Breck came scrambling toward me over the mound of rubble.
"O'Toole!"
"Here," I said, coughing and struggling to my hands and
knees, wiping blood out of my eyes. "Stone--"
"She's alive," he said. He didn't look well. "She didn't
quite make it clear, but I was able to pull her free. Both her
legs are broken. She has some cuts and bruises, possibly inter-
nal injuries, I cannot be certain."
"The Draconian?"
Breck looked over his shoulder at the pile of rock. "Under
there."
"What happened?" I said. "Who--"
"Cameron," said Breck. "Who else?"
"Razin?" someone shouted. "Razin, you alive?" The voice
echoed weirdly in the cavern. "O'Toole? Breck I"
Breck glanced at me and shook his head. "Make no
sound," he said, drawing his weapon.
"Razin, if you're alive, you'd best answer me, boy!" The
voice had to be Cameron's. "Your skimmer's destroyed. You
people aren't going anywhere. You want me to just leave you
here?"
"Can you move?" Breck said softly. "Is anything broken?''
"I don't know. I may have a concussion. I can't move my
right arm, but I think I can walk."
"Stone needs help," said Breck. "The only way we can
leave here now is with their skimmer. Us or them. They made
the choice. You understand?"
I nodded. "What do you want me to do?"
"Get over there with Stone," said Breck. "Try to keep them

	PSYCHODROME
	163

occupied while I work around behind them. Can you make
it?"

"I'll make it."

"Good man." He clapped me on the shoulder, giving it a
hard squeeze.

"Rudy?" I swallowed hard. "What do we do if you don't
come back?"

"I will be back," Breck said.
I smiled weakly. "Promise?"
"I promise."

I crawled around the mound of rubble piled before me,
under which the Draconian was buried. I wondered what
would happen now. I found Stone in the shelter of a large
stalagmite, where Breck had left her, her back propped up
against, it. She held a plasma pistol in her hand. The expression
on my face must have said it all, because she grimaced at
me wryly, clearly fighting back pain, and said, "Sorry. Didn't
have time to fix myself up."

Her face was caked with blood and rock dust and her
matted hair hung down in her eyes. She made no move to
brush it away as she reclined against the rock, breathing heavily.
She shut her eyes tightly, grimacing with pain. Her legs
were splayed out at odd angles. There had been no time for
Breck to splint them and nothing to splint them with. I took
her hand and she squeezed hard.

"I guess we blew it," she said, gritting her teeth.

"Not yet, we didn't. It isn't over 'til it's over."

She managed a small grin. "It isn't over 'til it's over. I like
that. Did you just make it up?"

"It's something my father always used to say. I never knew
if it made any sense or not until I started playing cards for
money."

"Well," she said, gasping with pain, "I can't say I care
much for this hand. You're the gambler. What do you suggest?''

"We can't afford .to fold. We'll have to bluff. Only in this
case, we make them think we're holding even worse cards than
we are. And with any luck, our partner will slip us an ace or
two under the table."

"What happens if they catch him at it?"

I shrugged. "That's why they call it gambling."

"I see. Remind me not to play poker with you."

164
	SIMON HAWKE

"Cameron!" I shouted, trying to make my voice sound as if
I had been badly hurt. I didn't have to try too hard.
"O'Toole?"
"Yeah. Don't shoot. Please."
"Where's'Razin?"
"Dead. $o's Breck. They were both buried when the wall
came down. Stone's hurt real bad. She's unconscious. She
may be dying. I can't move. My legs are broken. I'll do anything
you want, just don't kill me. Please. I'll tell you where
the fire crystals are. That's what you want, isn't it?"
I heard him laugh. It was a very unpleasant sound.
"What's so goddamned funny?"
"You don't have anything to bargain with, O'Toole. Look
above you."
I glanced up to where the wall of rock had come down,
burying the Draconian. The avalanche caused by the plasma
blast had exposed a face of shimmering crystal, a thick vein of
faceted clusters glowing with a lambent, inner fire of dazzling
colors.
"I just struck it rich, O'Toole," Cameron's voice came
back, echoing off the walls. "I !cheer Razin would lead me to
it! This whole cavern' must be full of fire crystal! There's
enough here for a man to buy his own damn planet!"
"What happens to us?" I shouted back. "What about
Smythe-Davie$ and the others?"
"Funny thing about that," Cameron called back. He
sounded closer. "Seems there was an accident. Guess their
team didn't do so well."
"Damn you, Cameron! That's murder! You'll never get
away with it."
"That's the way the game is played, rookie. You shouldn't
have bought into this one. The hell of it is, no one will ever
know. They use fire crystals to focus tachyon beam transmission,
did you know that? There's enough crystal in this cavern
to keep your signals bouncing around in here for years. It's just you and me in here."
So that was why the Draconian had led us through the tunnel
to the rface. If the cavern was full of fire crystal, there
was no need for us to hike up to the caldera, but he wanted to
be certain his message would get through. We couldn't broadcast
from inside the cavern.
"Cameron!" I shouted, holding my weapon ready. It
sounded as if he was trying to work his way up to us. I glanced

	PSYCHODROME
	165

at Stone, put my finger to my lips, and pointed to where I
thought he was coming from. Then I pointed at the mound of
rubble, thinking if I could get up above him, I might get a
clear shot at him. Stone nodded that she understood. "Cam-

eron, please! I'll do anything! I don't want to die!"

' 'Sorry, O' Toole. That's the way it goes."

I started to crawl toward the mound of rubble.

"Toss out your weapons, O'Toole! I'll make it quick and
painless."

I started to drag myself up the mound of rubble. I grabbed
hold of a rock and started to pull myself up, but it came loose
and started a small slide, taking me down with it. It broke
other rocks loose and they cascaded down over the ledge,
starting a small avalanche down into the bottom of the cavern.
I almost went over with it. I caught myself just in time.

"It'll never work, O'Toole!" yelled Cameron. "I know exactly
where you are! Give it up!"

A large part of the rubble mound had broken loose and
fallen over the ledge. I was in the open, an easy target, a fact
that was confirmed when a plasma blast plowed by so close to
me that I felt the heat wash past me and the rocks I was clinging
to suddenly grew very warm to the touch. The rocks
started to slide again and I scrambled for purchase. I was
obscured by the shower of rock chips and dust.

"You want it the hard way, O'Toole?" Cameron shouted
from somewhere below me.

I cursed Breck. Where in hell was he? Stone was on the
other side of the mound of rubble and couldn't cover me from
there. I was completely exposed, unable to fire. If I let go even
for an instant, I was sure to slide down over the ledge and it
was a long drop to the bottom.

"Say good-bye, O'Toole," I heard Cameron say from
behind me.

I heard a plasma pistol fire and wondered what it would feel
like to be incinerated, but the hellfire never came. I glanced
quickly over my shoulder and caught a glimpse of something
wreathed in blue flame falling down into the abyss below me.
It was a moment before I realized it was Cameron.

"Hang on, O'Toole!" shouted Breck from somewhere off
to my right.

I shut my eyes and pressed my face against the rock, clinging
to it like a bug to a wall and hoping it wouldn't start sliding
again. I had nothing left. That look down into the abyss and

166
	SIMON H AWKE

the sight of Cameron's burning body falling, tumbling end
over end, had taken all the fight right out of me. I had been
ready to die and had resigned myself to it, but miraculously,
my death had been postponed. It left me feeling giddy, wanting
to sob with relief.

I heard rocks skittering down as Breck came closer, moving
carefully. I began to believe the man was indestructible.

"Easy, O'Toole," he said, directly above me. "Easy now.
Stretch out your hand."

I was afraid to let go. I couldn't move.

"Come on, damn you," Breck said, "give me your hand or
must I pull you up by your hair?"

The crazy image of Breck hauling me up by the hair, like
some sort of caveman with his latest conquest, made me
chuckle in spite of myself and it broke the freeze. Cautiously, I
extended my hand to him. I felt his gloved, nysteel fingers
clamp around my wrist like a vise and suddenly I was being
pulled up effortlessly, as if I didn't weigh a thing. Rocks
started to slide under me, but Breck held me firmly in his grasp
and a moment later, I was pulled to safety.

"I found their skimmer," Breck said. "That bastard actually
had the nerve to follow Razin in. There's no sign of the

others. I think he must have done for them."

I nodded.

"Are you all right?"

I took a deep breath. "I thought I was a dead man back
there."

"You almost were. All things considered, I thought you
handled yourself rather well."

"You know," I said, "this is going to sound crazy, but for a
moment there, while I was clinging to the rocks, wondering if
Cameron was going to get me first or if another slide would
dump me over the edge, I had the wildest temptation to just let
go."

Breck nodded. "The magnetic attraction of fear. I am told
it literally pulls at you. It can be quite seductive."

"That's what it felt like. A sort of... pulling."

"But you did not give in to it."

"I don't know why. Too scared, I guess. Scared to let go."
"Clinging to life," said Breck. "I envy you the intensity of
that experience. Sometimes I wish I knew what it was to feel
afraid. Do you feel euphoric now?"

"Yes, I suppose I do. I don't know whether to laugh or cry.

	PSYCHODROME
	167

I'm trembling. How do you feel?"

Breck sighed. "Weary. And savagely bitter." He looked at
the pile of rock beneath which the Draconian was buried.
"That poor creature never had a chance. You know what will
happen now?"

I shook my head.

"We are going to finish what we started here, we humans,"
Breck said. "And my friend Bill Renn is going to be the man
saddled with the job. No one will look at what the Draconians
have done as self-defense. It will be considered an invasion
and we shall react accordingly. What a waste. What a damnable,
criminal waste."

"Maybe we can do something," I said.

"Perhaps," said Breck. "But I cannot see how. In any case,
we first have to figure out how to get out of here. Can you fly
a skimmer?"

I stared at him with a sinking feeling in my stomach. "No.
Can't you?"

"I have never flown one of these small, civilian models," he

said. He shrugged. "What the hell, how different can it be?"
"I think I'm going to be ill," I said.

"In that case, do it and get it over with. I will need your help
to carry Stone. I am not about to hike out of here with both of
you on my back."

"Okay. Give me a second."

I turned around, leaned forward, supporting myself on a
stalagmite, and emptied out my guts. It made me feel better,
though I still felt a little light-headed. When I was finished, I
looked up and my gaze fell upon the shimmering vein of fire
crystal exposed by the plasma blast from Cameron's gun. The
clusters gave off light in thousands of directions; the fires
danced within them, giving the illusion that the crystals were
filled with multicolored liquids pulsing through them. I was
staring at a fortune. All I had to do was break off a few
chunks and fill my pockets and I would have enough to set me
up for life, enough to buy off Saqqara or, if he would not be
bought off, enough to pay battalions of ninjas for his assassination.
But I couldn't reach the vein. It was on the other side
of the chasm and the rock slide it had been exposed by, which
had rained down on the ledge where we stood and crushed our
skimmer and buried the Draconian, had also blocked off the
entrance to the tunnel leading up to the caldera.

Cameron had said the cavern was full of crystal. We could

168
	SIMON HAWKE

undoubtedly find more. But strangely enough, perhaps irrationally,
I didn't care. I had yet to touch a fire crystal and now
I didn't want to. I was suddenly afraid that if I held one in my
hand, something would happen to me. The dancing fires
within the crystal had a hypnotic beauty that was now completely
lost on me, but if I actually touched them, they might
burn me with their cold flame and ignite something within me
that would turn me into someone just like Cameron. That
scared the hell out of me.
"Some people are players," Scan O'Toole had told me
once, "and some people are played. If you ever find yourself
standin' at a wheel, watchin' the ball going' round and round,
unable to take your eyes off the bloody thing as if that were
your heart bouncin' around down there, or if you're ever sit-tin'
at a table with your stake reduced to eatin' money, holdin'
a hand all full of nothin' and you know you ought to throw
'em down and leave, but somehow you just can't bring yourself
to do it, then you'll know you've got the fever and it's not
you holdin' the cards, but the other way around. If that ever
happens to you, son, then you'll know that you should never,
ever play again. Take your lumps and drag yourself away and
if ever anyone asks you to sit down to a game again, then
shoot'the bloody bastard, because he'll be askin' you to hang
yourself."
I was a player, a man who was used to taking risks. But
a real player knew when to cut his losses and walk away. I
looked down over the edge, into the chasm where Cameron
had cashed in his chips. And then I started walking.

-TEN-

There is something called a night terror, a nightmare so intense,
so realistic, that when you awaken from it, the dream
imagery briefly remains engraved upon your consciousness,
etched so sharply that the border line between the states of
wakefulness and dreaming is momentarily erased. Imagine
being trapped deep within the REM state, tossing and turning
in your sweat-soaked sheets, pursued across the dreamscape
by some slathering demon conjured up from your subconscious.
The reality of the experience seems indisputable, there
is no awareness of its being a nightmare, no urgent feeling that
you must wake up because you do not realize you are asleep.
Fear drives you to the breaking point and some involuntary
mental circuit breaker finally clicks over to prevent the
overload and you are suddenly wrenched out of your dream so
quickly that you linger for a moment in a sort of double exposure
state--you know you are awake, and yet the nightmare
won't let go. It has pursued you into reality and there that
demon stands at the foot of your bed, grinning at you horribly.

169

170
	SIMON HAWKE

It is hard to convey to someone who has never suffered
night terrors exactly how awful the experience can be, not so
much because it's frightening in itself--although it is extremly
so--as because it shakes the very foundations of what you
consider to be real. Repeated doses can drive you over the
edge. People who regularly suffer night terrors become afraid
to go to sleep and their raveling reality frequently results in
schizophrenia.
When I woke up, someone had erased the borders. I remembered
everything with an incredible clarity and couldn't bring
myself to question its reality even while some part of me was
vigorously trying to deny it. I knew it had been real, yet I had
awakened from a dream. I saw the by-now familiar surroundings
of the Psychodrome game center and I thought it had all
been a hallucinact and felt relief that it was over. Only the
night terror had followed me into my waking state and I knew
it had not been a cybernetic dream. My shoulder was still sore
from where the rock had struck it when the cavern wall came
down and I felt the wound on my forehead, still there, no
longer bleeding, but no less real for that. I sought relief, an explanation,
a way to make the conclusion fit the facts. I had
been tossing and turning on the couch and I had fallen off,
striking my head on the edge of the couch, causing the gash,
and then hitting the floor in such a way as to cause the
shoulder injury. It was a convenient scenario, one I clung to
gratefully until Mondago injected a harsh close of reality and
blasted it to pieces.
The first thing I saw upon opening my eyes was the ceiling,
then the walls with their banks of instruments, then Breck
lying on the couch next to mine. He was already sitting up
before I became fully conscious. I didn't want to move. I shut
my eyes and opened them again, taking inventory, trying to
decide if it had been a real experience or an electronically programmed
hallucination. Then Mondago's face moved into
frame. He was staring down at me, his face intent, concerned.
There was someone standing close beside him, someone I
had never seen before, a middle-aged man wearing an Army
officer's uniform with a powder blue fourragre around his
shoulder and about ten rows of ribbons over his left breast
pocket. I moved my head and saw another man standing
beside the Army officer, this one dressed in a dark, expensive
suit, severe and elegantly tailored in conservative, executive
fashion. Both men looked very serious. I sat up, fully awake,

	PSYCHODROME
	171

and it was only then I noticed the empty third couch.

"How do you feel, O'Toole?" Mondago said, sounding incongruously
like an anxious father.

I nodded. "All right, I guess." I glanced at Breck, sitting
on the edge of his couch, staring thoughtfully at the two
strangers. "What's going on? Where's Stone?"

"These gentlemen insist on speaking with you now," Mon-dago
said, accenting the word "now" slightly.

The man with the dark suit did not bother to introduce himself.
Neglecting to introduce himself had probably become a
habit, acquired with years of having one's power unequivocally
accepted, one's word unquestioned, one's status as
Authority taken as an irrevocable fact of nature. The simple
courtesy of giving somebody your name became superfluous
when that somebody didn't matter to you in the slightest. You
don't introduce yourself to a chesspiece you move upon a
board.

He looked from me to Breck and spoke in the manner of
one who spends his life issuing directives. "First of all, I want
you both to understand that what goes on in this room, every
single word that's said, is classified information. Top secret.
You are to discuss it with no one. No one, is that clear? Any
breach of security will be treated as a treasonable offense
and--"

"Wait a minute," I interrupted. "What the hell is this
about? And who the hell are you?"

He gave me a look of extreme annoyance. I had questioned
the unquestionable. "My name is Coles, Mr. O'Toole, and
this is General Tyrian, from the Pentagon. And that's already
more than you need to know. Who I am should be of less importance
to you than the fact that I have the power to confine
you for the remainder of your life, the duration of which
could also be at my discretion. If I were you, I would remain
silent and pay very close attention. Nod your head if you
understand me."

I nodded, by reflex more than anything else, and by doing
so confirmed his. authority over me. The command had been
given; I had instantly obeyed. It had been done quickly,
smoothly, and efficiently and it had the desired effect of
reducing my brief rebellion to a pliable submissiveness. I had
always known there were people like this but this was the first
time I had ever met one. This was one of "Them," the ubiquitous
"They" people always refer to, as in "They'll never

172
	SIMON HAWKE

let you get away with it" or "They're wise to that one" or
"They don't care, They make the rules."

"We were unable to monitor the transmission of your experience
while you were in the cavern on Draconis 9," he said,
"so I want you to tell me, without omitting a single detail, exactly
what went on there and the manner in which Stone
Winters died."

I felt as if I had been gut-punched. "What are you talking
about?"

"Mr. O'Toole, we reviewed the transmission of your experience
in the volcanic caldera. That portion of the transmission,
of course, was not broadcast over the psych-fidelity
network. Mr. Mondago realized that would have resulted in
mass panic and he wisely contacted us immediately. However,
from your behavior and particularly from your reactions
through the interface, it seemed obvious that both you and
Mr. Breck felt a not inconsiderable sympathy for the shape-changer.
You certainly made no attempt to kill it when you
found out what it was. You may be faced with a charge of
treason and conspiracy and possibly accessory to murder after
the fact. I would strongly advise you to cooperate voluntarily.
You would not find involuntary cooperation very pleasant, I
assure you."

"I'd be happy to cooperate," I said. "I just don't know
what you're talking about. Why are you threatening us with
charges? And what's this about a murder? Stone isn't dead!
She came back with us! Breck, tell him!"

"It seems it was not Stone who returned with us," Breck
said slowly in a level voice, watching the two men very carefully.
"And they apparently think we are responsible."

"That's crazy! She was hurt! We carried her back to the
skimmer! Her legs were broken! She was treated by the doctors
in Casino--"

"And 'she' somehow managed to heal rapidly enough to
knock out three technicians and walk right out of this room,"
said General Tynan. "Two of those men are in the hospital;
one is in critical condition. That thing came out of downtime
before the revival signal was transmitted and now there's no
telling where it may be. It may have left the building complex
or it may still be here somewhere, posing as one of the employees.
It could have taken any form at all. For all I know, it
may be that chair over there or a desk in one of the offices.
You people brought a shapechanger back from Draconis 9 and

	PSYCHODROME
	173

now it's loose somewhere in the city. For all I know, you could
be shapechangers yourselves. If the creature was able to fool
the doctors on Draconis 9, right down to the broken bones
showing on the medscan, how do I know you're human?"

"For that matter, General," Breck said, "how do we know
you are human? If we were to indulge our paranoia, we might
just as easily assume that Mr. Coles is the Draconian. After
all, Draconians can shapechange with surprising speed. How
do we know the real Mr. Coles was not intercepted somewhere
in the corridor by the Draconian and killed?"

General Tyrian frowned, then glanced at Coles uneasily.
Coles smiled mirthlessly. "I see that Mr. Breck, at least, appreciates
the gravity of the situation. Though he describes it in
somewhat iconoclastic terms, that is nevertheless precisely the
position we find ourselves in at the moment, which is why not
a word of this can go beyond this room. If we are to accept the
creature at its word, then there is no way of telling how many
shapechangers may have infiltrated us. No one will have any
way of knowing who is human and who--or what--is not."

"If you had listened to the military in the first place," Breck
said, "you might have dealt with this threat years ago when it
all started. The SS has been telling you people all along that
your half-assed quarantine was a certain invitation to disaster.
Well, it has finally happened. Frankly, Mr. Coles, whoever or
whatever you are in the governmental heirarchy is of no consequence
to me and I am not at all inclined to listen to any

allegations that we were somehow responsible for this."
"Now listen here, Breck--" Coles began.

"No, you listen," Breck said. "If you wanted a couple of
scapegoats for this, I have no doubt you would hang O'Toole
and me out to dry, but you would only require scapegoats if
word of this got out. I assume it has not. Now, I could go on
making assumptions, but it would be very much easier for
everyone concerned if you ceased flexing your bureaucratic
muscles and got directly to the point."

Coles was momentarily taken aback. People like Coles do
not have many weaknesses, but there is one thing that always
catches them off guard and that is a man who simply doesn't
care. People whose power base is money, political clout, or
legislative control or any combination of the three grow to depend
upon that power because it is damn near omnipotent. A
wealthy man can call his lawyer, mention your name, and say,
"Make his life miserable, hurt him!" The result would be a

174
	SIMON HAWKE

fallout that makes the trials of Job look trivial by comparison.
A man like Coles could probably wield the power of innumerable
governmental agencies against you, deprive you of
your livelihood and liberty. People like that are not moved by
threats of lawsuits. They have more than enough money to
employ batteries of lawyers to squash you like a bug. You
can't threaten them with laws, because they own the system.
But there is one thing that pulls the rug right out from under
them--someone who doesn't care about all that they can do.
Someone who looks them squarely in the eye and say, "Yeah,
I know you've got the power. I know you can bring the system
down on me. But how is that going to help you when I come
across this desk right now and go directly for your throat?"

Breck wasn't threatening the man, but what he did
amounted to the same thing in a way. He was recognizing the
power Coles had, accepting it and merely shrugging his
shoulders. He was saying, in effect, "So what?" Power can
intimidate only when someone is scared of it. And Breck did
not get scared.

I was following all this in a sort of distanced way, as if it
were all happening to someone else. Part of me still refused to
believe it. Stone dead. How was it possible? Unfortunately, I
knew all too well how it was possible, but that meant accepting
an unacceptable reality. When the cavern wall came down, it
had come down on both Stone and the shapechanger. She had
not managed to get clear at all. She had been buried, crushed
beneath tons of rock. She had probably died instantly. At least
I hoped to God she had.

The shapechanger must have reverted to its natural form
and somehow survived the rockfall in its plastic, protoplasmic
state. Then, in that same state, it must have oozed between the

rocks to where Stone's body had been buried and...

I recoiled from the thought.

I remembered her leaning back against the rock formation,
grimacing with the pain from her two broken legs, her hair
matted and her face caked with rock dust--it had been Stone.
It couldn't have been the shapechanger.

I remembered helping Breck carry her back to the skimmer,
arranging her carefully so as to minimize the pain, strapping
her in so that she would not be moved around unnecessarily.
She had smiled at me and made little jokes, self-deprecating
comments...

I remembered that frightening passage back through the

	PSYCHODROME
	175

tunnel, Breck flying the skimmer as slowly as possible, almost
hovering, until we were out in the open and rising rapidly out
of the gorge, flying for hours through the mountains, running
low on fuel, trying to find our way back to the ground base,
and finally establishing radio contact and asking to be brought
in...

I remembered the first aid she was given at the ground base,
how we were forced to remain in quarantine there for the
prescribed period of time while they observed us carefully,
despite the fact that she required further medical attention. I
recalled Breck being debriefed and telling them about how
Razin had successfully circumvented all their quarantine procedures
and how frightened they had looked, but no one had
ever suspected Stone, who suffered through her ordeal and
kept her spirits up despite the pain. Even in Casino, when we
came to see her in the hospital, she had been sitting up in bed,
complaining that the doctors were keeping her too long...

The shapechanger had fooled everyone. The broken legs
were real, a subterfuge, executed perfectly. The medscan
showed broken bones and no one even thought to question if
those were human bones or not. And even if they had, would
there have been any way for them to tell? Logic said there had
to be. On some level of their molecular biology, the Draco-nians
had to be visibly different than we were. At some point,
their imitative faculties had to break down. But where? How
closely would they have to be examined before the simulacrum
revealed itself? There was so little known about them, it was
difficult even to theorize. And they knew ever so much more
about us than we knew about them.

I felt an immeasurable sense of loss, but I couldn't grieve
for Stone, for the woman I had loved, for the relationship that
might have been. Things were happening too fast and they
were giving me no time. Coles and General Tynan debriefed us
exhaustively. Finally, apparently satisfied that we had no conscious
part in smuggling the Draconian back to Earth, they
outlined their plan for trying to apprehend the shapechanger.
It centered on the biochip which had been implanted in
Stone's brain.

"We are still receiving signals from the biochip," said
Coles. I didn't fail to notice how casually Coles and the
megacorporate entity that was Psychodrome had become
"we." Nor did I fail to notice how Mondago now remained
almost completely in the background. Coles had taken over.

176
	SIMON HAWKE

"That biochip is the key to capturing the shapechanger. The
signals coming in are peculiar and intermittent. Apparently,
the people in your engineering section can't seem to decide if
this is a function of the different life form it is now interfacing
with or if the biochip was damaged in the process of Stone
Winters's death and subsequent assimilation."

Assimilation, I thought. Trust someone like Coles to come
up with a word like assimilation as a euphemism for being
eaten. My stomach churned.

"We don't know exactly how the biochip is interfacing with
the alien," Coles continued. "We are working under the assumption
that since the shapechanger seems to function on the
basis of absolute mimicry, that is to say, perfect duplication of
another life form down to the last excruciating detail, it
somehow flows into that form during assimilation in a manner
that assumes the same positional characteristics. In other
words, since the biochip was implanted in Stone Winters's
brain, it is now in the exact same location within the shape-changer--interfacing
with the so-called human brain the alien
has shaped or mimicked rather than being located in its stomach,
say, or large intenstines. This raises the question of why.
If the alien life form is so plastic, why couldn't it have somehow
arranged for the biochip to... 'flow' within its organic
structure so that it would wind up somewhere in its digestive
system, from where it could be easily expelled? Perhaps it was
not aware of the biochip's function."

"Of course it was aware," said Breck. "Draconians are
telepathic. It knew we were capable of broadcasting our experiences
back to Earth via the biochip. That was the whole
point of its interaction with us."

"That wasn't what I meant," said Coles. "Perhaps I
phrased it badly. What I meant was that maybe it could not
recognize the biochip for what it was, even though it was
aware that there was such a thing. We are assuming that the
creature possesses no sophisticated knowledge of cybernetics.
It would probably have to spend some time in telepathic contact
with an engineer in order to acquire such knowledge.
However, as a result of its telepathic contact with you and
other crystal hunters on Draconis 9 and in Casino, it could be
aware that there are many humans who have such devices implanted
within them, either to maintain some natural function
which would otherwise be impaired or to augment normal
abilities. Like a pacemaker, for example. It might not be able

	PSYCHODROME
	177

to differentiate between them. Perhaps even now it is working
on identifying the biochip for certain as being what it is, so
that it can expel it from its body. If that is the case, then we
don't have much time."

"Or else it already knows and has chosen to retain the biochip,"
said Breck. "That seems like a much more likely possibility
to me."

"Why would it do that if it knew that the biochip would
give us the ability to track it?" Coles said, frowning.

"Perhaps because it wants to maintain contact," said
Breck.

"For what possible purpose?"

"I have no idea," said Breck. "I can only guess, as you are
doing. But it strikes me that what the shapechanger wanted to
accomplish through its contact with us was to reach the human
race. The biochip will allow it a certain ability to accomplish
that, even if you censor the transmission and keep it from
being broadcast over the mass media. It would still have contact
with you. That may be precisely what it wants."

"Interesting idea," Coles said. "However, that would make
the creature vulnerable, wouldn't it? Surely it must know
that."

"I do not doubt it," Breck said. "Still, a biochip is not exactly
a homing transmitter. Having access to the Draconian's
perceptual experiences is not quite the same as knowing
precisely where it is. Admittedly, the biochip would help you
track it down, but Draconians are very good at hiding. There
is yet another possibility you seem not to have considered.
You said you were receiving peculiar, intermittent signals. The
biochip is partially organic and the Draconians have a great
deal of organic flexibility. Has it occurred to you that the
Draconian may be learning to control it?"

General Tynan glanced at Mondago nervously. "Is that
possible?"

"I don't know," said Mondago, frowning thoughtfully.
"Ordinarily, I would say no, but we are faced with something
very different here. I am not a cybernetics engineer, but I'm
not even certain that our staff engineers could answer such a
question and we employ some of the top cybernetics specialists
in the world. At the moment, they're attempting to diagnose
the cause for the peculiar biochip responses we're receiving
from the alien and they don't seem to be making .any headway."

178
	SIMON HAWKE

"Terrific," Tynan said with disgust. "We've been invaded
and we can't even find the goddamn enemy."

"On the other hand, perhaps we can," said Coles. "Assuming
these two gentlemen will help us."

It wasn't exactly a request, but it was nice of him to phrase
it that way. Considering what was at stake, I wondered what
Coles would have done if we refused. Perhaps it was best not
to wonder about such things. The plan he outlined was fairly
simple and there was no guarantee that it would work, but it
was probably the best that anyone could do, given the situation.
We would be taken out of the gaming round and some
sort of explanation would be broadcast as to why the third
scenario, which would undoubtedly have been the hallucinact,
had been deleted. Technical difficulties or something. On the
basis of that, we would be awarded the win and our broadcast
transmissions would cease so that the audience could then concentrate
on the fight for second place. In the meantime, we
would be on indefinite loan to the government, as ambulatory
scanners.

There was nothing wrong with the signals from our bio-chips,
so while the engineers worked to diagnose the trouble
with the biochip inside the Draconian, we would be sent out in
an effort to track down the alien's location based upon the intermittent
flashes of data that came in from it. In turn, we
would be monitored ourselves and since our signals would not
be intermittent, Coles or Tynan or whoever was in charge of
keeping track of us would have our location at any given time,
so that a strike by standby SS troops could be called down at
any moment. The whole idea sounded vaguely familiar to me.
I think it was based upon an ancient hunting ploy--staking
out a Judas goat.

"You think you can handle it?" said Coles.

"Suppose we find the shapechanger," I said. "When this
so-called strike is called in, I assume someone will warn us to
get out of the way?"

"Every effort will be made to minimize the risk to you,"
said Coles.

"In other words, no," Breck said dryly.

"So we're expendable, is that it?" I said.

"Strictly speaking, yes," said Coles. "I'm not going to
mince words with you. If it comes down to a choice between
letting the shapechanger escape or taking out all three of you,
it's not going to be much of a choice. However, keep in mind

	PSYCHODROME
	179

'that it's of paramount importance for us to take the alien
alive. If we're to have any hope of dealing with this invasion,
then we have to have at least one of the creatures in custody, in
a secure environment where it can be studied and interrogated."

"And how, exactly," Breck asked, "are you planning to
capture a creature that can assume a protoplasmic shape and
slip out of restraints or seep through cracks?"

"We're working on it," Tynan said. "You leave the worrying
about catching the damn thing to us. You just concentrate
on finding it."

"When do we start?" I said.

"Right now, Mr. O'Toole," said Coles. He went to the
door and opened it for us. "You brought that thing here. Now
get out there and help us find it."

It still hadn't really hit me. Soldiers--and not only soldiers,
but anyone who has been subjected to a traumatic experience
--sometimes suffered something known as Delayed Stress
Syndrome. It was a condition that had been pretty much
unknown prior to the Southeast Asian conflict of the twentieth
century. It had existed, but no one had ever bothered to
characterize it until veterans of the Vietnam War started to
succumb to its effects in large numbers. Profound depression,
suicidal tendencies, psychotic behavior--those were only a few
of the results of Delayed Stress Syndrome. An "atypical depression
with psychotic features" was the clinical way of describing
a terrifying hallucination in which the victim relived
the experience which had caused the trauma. I wondered if
that was what I had to look forward to.

I felt nothing. Absolutely nothing. No grief, no pain; it
simply wasn't there. The woman I had been in love with had
been killed in a horrifying way, her body consumed by an alien
creature which had then taken her form, and I had taken it all
in, it had registered, I had accepted it, and now I was simply
going on. I felt a vague sense of guilt at even being able to
function. I felt no hate for the Draconian. It hadn't killed her,
after all; it had merely taken advantage of her death. It was
only trying to protect itself. It was struggling to save its species.

"What do you think they'll do?" I said to Breck as we left
the building and went out into the streets of New York City.

"About what?" he said.

180
	SIMON HAWKE

"About Draconis 9. They can't keep running the Combine
operation as they have before. The quarantine's been broken.
They'll have to put it on for real now, won't they? Nobody
goes down to Draconis 9. The ground bases get closed and the
habitats evacuated--"

"To where?" said Breck. "How would they know who they
were evacuating? They wouldn't want to risk bringing back
any more ambimorphs."

"I hadn't thought of that. So what do you think they'll
do?"

"I suspect they'll probably quarantine the habitats," said
Breck. "No one will be going home until they arrive at an infallible
test to determine if someone's human or not. If it were
my decision, I'd quarantine the ground bases as well. No one
else goes down and nobody comes up. However, it is what will

happen afterward I am afraid of."

"Afterward?"

"They will never accept a situation in which they had to
hear terms dictated by a bunch of intelligent amoebas. I suspect
they will probably hold off as long as possible, on the
theory that it may forestall these terrorist acts the Draconians
have threatened, but you can be sure that it will not be long

before they move to exterminate all life on Draconis 9."
"All life?"

"They call it a surgical strike," said Breck. "We have had
the capability to do it ever since the invention of the neutron
bomb. The technique has been refined considerably since
then. There will be severe damage to the ecosystem, to be sure,
but nothing a well developed terraforming plan cannot repair
in time. They will justify it on the grounds of preventing an
alien invasion, safeguarding the peace and security of the
human race, manifest destiny or some such thing. The result
will be a sterilized planet ready to be either terraformed or disassembled.
But not until all the fire crystal has been mined."

"You know, there's something else that just occured to
me," I said. "The Draconian had said something about how
they can easily reproduce here. Amoebas reproduce by binary
fission."

Breck stopped and stared at me. "There's a highly unpleasant
thought. However, they would have to effect some profound
changes to the human physiology they have mimicked
in order to do that.., assuming that is the way they reproduce."

	PSYCHODROME
	181

"Unless they revert back to their original form to reproduce,"
I said.

Breck nodded. "Perhaps, but they would be vulnerable during
the process. And if they reverted to their natural form,
they would lose their protective coloration and that would
make them easy to spot."

"Maybe," I said, "but in a city like New York, or any other
large city for that matter, who'd pay any attention to some
sludge lying in an alley?"

Breck raised his eyebrows and nodded. "A good point. It
seems we are giving our friend Mr. Coles a great deal to think
about."

"I hope it gives him one hell of a migraine."

"I already have one hell of a migraine, thank you, Mr.
O'Toole," Coles's voice came to us through the interface.
"You have indeed given me a lot to think about. In the meantime,
we've been picking up some scattered images from the
alien's biochip. We've strung them all together and we'll be

feeding them to you momentarily. A re you ready to receive?"
Breck looked at me and nodded. "Anytime," said Breck.
Disjointed images started flashing through my mind like a
collage. I "saw" a technician turning around and looking at
me with surprise and I "heard" him shout as he was grabbed
and thrown across the room. I experienced a brief flash of
feeling as if I had been the one who threw him and then there
was a mad flurry of images and perceptions all blurred together,
impossible to differentiate, followed by a sensation of
movement and I saw the corridors of the Psychodrome headquarters
building from the alien's point of view as it moved
quickly, running past people who turned to stare at it with
surprise--I wondered if they were staring at Stone or if the
alien had already taken another form--and then the creature
was out in the street, looking around, a feeling of puzzlement,
disorientation--more fuzzy images, light refractions, a dizzying
cornucopia of unidentifiable sensations--was I experiencing
the alien's thought patterns through the interface?--more
running, seeing people passing by, some responding to the
alien's flight, some not, some being shoved out of the way--crossing
a spanway against traffic, stopping in the middle as
vehicles screamed past, their computer guidance systems making
handling decisions faster than human thought could and
avoiding a collision by stark millimeters--the experience of
standing out upon the spanway with the spires of the city tow-

182
	SIMON HAWKE

ering above, the levels down below, the sheer mass and complexity
of it overwhelming all ability to cope--and then the
siren of a police skimmer, the urgent feeling of needing to
escape, the PA system on the police skimmer barking out a
command and then flight, running quickly down the spanway,
being pursued, and then a DIVE over the side!--plunging!--falling!--spinning
end over end and hurtling down into the
city's depths,' another spanway coming up below and then--the
sounds of flapping, the sensation of air pressing upon

wings, lightness, speed, gliding, soaring, swooping down to...
It stopped.

I held my breath.

"Dramatic, wasn't it?" said Coles.

"Jesus."

"Mondago says the engineers have been unable to isolate
those blurred sense impressions you experienced," said Coles.
"I've got xenobiologists en route from Clarke Station, but
their shuttle hasn't landed yet. As soon as they arrive, I'll plug
them in and feed it to them, see what they can make of it. Apparently,
the biochip is, to a certain extent, functioning
exactly as it's supposed to. It's giving us not only perceptual
feedback from the alien, but some of its feelings as well. If the
thing even has feelings. The engineers are calling it APT, 'Archetypal
Persona Transference,' whatever the hell that means.
If we can make some sense out of it, maybe we can get some
sort of handle on how the creature thinks. What did you make
o/it?"

"It scared the shit out of me," I said.

"I was hoping for a somewhat more analytical reaction,"
Coles responded.

"I experienced the strongest identification with the early
part of the transmission," Breck said, "while it was still in
human form, in roughly familiar surroundings. Keep in mind
the Draconian had been in Casino, so a human urban environment
would not be completely strange to it. However, the environment
in an orbital habitat is considerably smaller and
more closed in than New York City. The moment the creature
reached the outside, I experienced a distinct sensation of
agoraphobia.., and something else, I'm not sure what. Fear,
perhaps. Uncertainty."

"If it's telepathic, shouldn't it have expected what it would
be like outside?" responded Coles.

"Having telepathic knowledge of something may be one

	PS¥CHODROME
	183

thing," Breck said, "but actual, direct experience is something
else."

"Makes sense to me," I said. "I thought I experienced a
strong sensation of feeling disoriented."

"What struck me most," said Breck, "was that there was
absolutely no perceptual difference or sensation associated
with the shapechange. It leaped over the railing of the span-way,
fellmand there was the familiar sensation of falling, or at
least it was translated into that familiar sensation in my mind
--and then I was aware of the Draconian flying, having wings.
It clearly shapechanged into some sort of bird, but I experienced
no sense of transition."

"Neither did I," I said. "One moment it felt as if I were
falling and the next I was gliding like an eagle. I wasn't really
aware of the exact moment the change took place."

"Scary little beasties, aren't they?" Coles responded.
"Well, at least we know roughly which way the creature's
headed. It's heading downtown, toward the lower levels.
We're still receiving intermittent transmissions. As soon as
your people have something edited together, I'll send you an
update. Meanwhile, at least you've got a direction as a start-ingpoint."

"Downtown lower levels," I said. "Good thing we brought
our guns."

"Just try to keep yours hidden beneath your jacket," Breck
said. "We would waste valuable time explaining things to a
vigilant policeman. We would probably be better off hailing a
cab."

"Good luck getting one to go down there," I said.

A skimmer came down and settled in front of us. The
canopy slid back and the pilot flashed his ID at us. "Mr. Coles
said you might be needing a ride."

I glanced at Breck. "The man doesn't waste any time," I
said.

Breck grimaced. "I do not think he can afford to."

We got into the skimmer and it took off, climbing fast and
banking sharply. The pilot put it in a hard dive toward the
lower levels.

"Take it easy," Breck said. "Are you in that much of a
hurry.*"

"Mr. Coles said--"

"Forget about what Mr. Coles said," Breck said. "I would
like to get down in one piece."

184
	SIMON HAWKE

The skimmer built up speed, continuing its dive.
"Look, this thing was not built to be flown like a combat
vehicle," said Breck. "Pull up."
"I'm trying," said the pilot.
"What do you mean, you're trying.*" I said.
"I mean I can't pull out!" the pilot shouted. "Something's
gone wrong! I've lost control!"
"Get over!" Breck said, reaching over the seat and pushing
the pilot aside so that he could grab the joystick. The city was
coming up at us with alarming speed. We were fast approaching
the interlacing spanways of the middle levels. "Damn,"
Breck said, fighting the panicking pilot and the joystick. He
clipped the man on the side of the head with his artificial fist
and the pilot slumped down on the seat, unconscious.
We started to spin.
"Christ, Breck, do something!" I said.
"The joystick is frozen," Breck said.
We barely missed one spanway and continued plummeting
toward the lower levels, the wind screaming past us as the
skimmer screamed down in an almost vertical dive, rolling,
corkscrewing as the ground rushed up to us--
"Breck!"
"I cannot pull out," he said, straining against the frozen
joystick. "We are going too fast."
"No, goddamn it! I don't want to die!"
"I do not see what we can do about it," Breck said, still
fighting the stick, refusing to give up even though it was
clearly, horrifyingly too late.
"Shit! Shit!"
A spanway came up fast, too fast, unbelievably fast, we
were going to hit, we were going to auger right into the damn
thing--
I screamed...

The impact never came. Someone was holding me down,
pressing on my shoulders. I was still screaming. I fought that
hold, trying to get up, and then suddenly I realized I was lying flat on a couch in the game center and one of the technicians
was shaking me, trying to snap me out of it. The night terror
had followed me into wakefulness and the dream would not let
go. I stopped screaming and struggling.
Mondago was bending over me. "How do you feel,
O'Toole?"

	PSYCHODROME
	185

I blinked and took a deep, ragged breath. "All right, I
guess." I glanced over at Breck, sitting up on the edge of his
couch. I felt an indescribable sense of relief. "Jesus. Jesus,
that was awful. I thought it was all over."
It had all been a hallucinact. A devastating one and I hated
Mondago for it, but at least it wasn't real. I had survived. And
Stone--
I glanced over at the other couch.
It was empty.
I sat up quickly.
And then I saw General Tynan.
And Coles.
I looked from them to Breck to Mondago.
"I'm sorry, O'Toole," Mondago said. "I had no choice in
the matter. These gentlemen insisted."
Coles came forward. "It had to be done, O'Toole," he said.
"For security's sake. Nothing's changed, but I had to know
for certain that you and Breck were what you seemed. We
were blind while you were in that cavern. I couldn't take a
chance. You two could have been shapechangers as well. I
figured if you were, then faced with imminent death, you'd
change--"
I hit him. Hard. With everything I had. I came right off that
couch and landed on his chest, swinging, screaming at him. It
took both Breck and General Tynan to pull me off him.
"You son of a bitch! You son of a bitchin' bastard..."
Coles slowly got up off the floor, wiping the blood away
from his mouth. I'll give you that one," he said. "But that's
all you're going get. Now pull yourself together. That alien is
still out there somewhere and you two have a job to do."

-ELEVEN-

It was a while before I could speak. I was so tightly wound
that one wrong word from anyone, one perfectly innocent
gesture might have set me off. The emotions coursing through
me were so strong I felt as if I were vibrating like a tuning
fork. It felt as if I had been taken up, then down, then brought
back up and then slammed down again and I didn't even know
what was real anymore. What's more, I wasn't even certain
that I cared. All I knew was that I felt angry, more than angry,
furious, like a heat-seeking missile looking for a target to
destroy.
"Did you know?" I finally asked Breck when I thought I
could control myself well enough to handle a normal conversation.
He had understood. He had given me the time I needed
and now he answered cautiously, gauging my reactions to see just how close to the edge I really was.
"That it was a hallucinact program?" he said. "No, of
course not."
"You handled it much better than I did," I said.
"I would not say so."

186

	PSYCHODROME
	187

"I panicked. Lost my nerve."

"So would I have panicked, had not that particular circuit
been bypassed in my genetic programming," Breck said. "I
merely reacted in the only way I could react. I want to survive
as much as you do. The fact that I do not have the ability to
feel afraid does not make me more courageous than you are."

"Funny," I said. "You seem fascinated by the emotion of
fear, just because you can't experience it. Right about now,
I'd give a lot to be wired the way you are. I don't seem to be
handling this very well. I wanted to kill that bastard, Coles.
Still do. But even if I got my hands around his throat, how do
I know he'd really die? It all seemed so goddamned real. How
do I know this is real, right now? I mean, what if all this is still
the same hallucinact? What if we're still lying back there in the
game center, only thinking we'd come out of it? Maybe we
never came out of it at all. Maybe none of this has happened.
Maybe it's all been a programmed hallucination right from the
very start. How the hell does anybody tell?"

"I cautioned you before," Breck said, "when all this
started. I warned you not to think about it. Forget about hal-lucinacts.
Treat everything as if it were absolutely real.
Chances are it is. If it is not and you have approached it with
the sensibility that it was real, then no harm has been done. On
the other hand, if you begin to doubt the reality of your experience,
you will stop trusting your senses or at least you will
develop the tendency to question your perceptions during
moments of stress. That could prove fatal and that way also
lies insanity."

"You mean you never wonder about it?"

"No," said Breck. "I have learned to force it from my
mind. It is not very difficult to do. It is far easier to trust the
evidence of your senses than to question what they tell you.
Suppose I had succumbed to doubt while that illusory skimmer
was spiraling down in a crash dive. Suppose it had not
been a hallucinact. What then? I might have found something
to cling to in the face of such a desperate situation. I might
have attempted to convince myself that it was all an illusion
because what my senses were telling me was real seemed so
hopeless. And since it had seemed hopeless, I might have
simply given up and hoped that I would wake from it in one
piece. But if it had been real, we would have been dead. Instead,
I treated it as real; it never occurred to me to question

188
	SIMON HAWKE

its reality and so I continued fighting to pull out of that dive
right to the very end.., because I might have managed it, you
see."

"Yes, I see. No false hopes that way."

"Precisely."

"I'm surprised it doesn't drive the players crazy."

"It often does," Breck said. "A high percentage of the
players in high-risk scenarios become insane. For what should
be obvious reasons, the company does not release those figures.
That would not make for very good publicity."

It seemed utterly ridiculous. Here we were, part of only a
handful of people who knew that humanity had been infiltrated
by alien life forms and we were talking about what
might or might not be favorable publicity for Psychodrome. I
was filled with a sense of dbj& vu again. We were flying high
above the city in a skimmer piloted by one of Coles's men, the
very same man who had piloted the skimmer in the halluci-nact.
The intricacies of cybernetic reality programming in the
hands of a man like Coles was a frightening thought.

Nothing had been wasted. The hallucinact had been designed
to maximize the flow of data so that we could immediately
respond to the situation without delay when we
woke from it. Coles was not concerned about the recommended
rest interval following a programming. The data feed
from the alien's biochip had been incorporated into the illusion
and it had been real, even if our experience was not. We
hadn't lost much time. And if we had proved to be Draconians
in human form, well, then Coles would have accomplished a
large part of his objective by inducing us to shapechange while
still under his control. A complicated thinker, Mr. Coles.

"Well, at least there's one good thing about all this," I said.
"So long as they're not broadcasting our experiences, Saq-qara's
assassins don't know where I am."

Breck glanced at me sharply. "Would you believe I had
forgotten all about that?"

"Things have been a little hectic lately," I said.

"I would not advise relaxing yet," said Breck. "In some
ways, we are even more vulnerable now than we were befoxe.
We still have the ambimorph to deal with and just because our
experiences are not being broadcast does not mean we are safe
from your Egyptian friend. It has been announced that we
have returned from the Fire Islands. Anyone watching for us

	PSYCHODROME
	189

at game headquarters will know we are back. We must be
careful."

"We?" I said. "It's me they want, Rudy. This isn't your
fight."

"^ commendable sentiment, O'Toole, but we are in this
thing together. Besides, I have a bone or two of my own to
pick with your Mr. Saqqara. Several of my fellow hybreeds
were killed back at Draconis Base by his assassins. In a sense,
that is like losing family. As soon as this is over, I think you
and I should take some time off to go to Tokyo and do
something about Mr. $aqqara. Something rather drastic."

"Sorry to interrupt your private business, gentlemen,"
Coles said through the interface, "but there are somewhat
more urgent matters to attend to. We've got another data feed
we're going to boot up to you. The signals are starting to come
in less .frequently. We may be losing the implant. Stand by for
an update."

The first image to come in startled me so badly that for a
moment I thought I was having a flashback from the hallucin-act.
Suddenly, it seemed as if I were spinning downward in the
skimmer once again, plummeting toward the ground. It didn't
help that we were sitting in the back of an airborne skimmer as
the data feed came in. It took me a moment to realize that
what I was experiencing were the perceptions of the shape-changer
in its bird form as it swooped down for a landing. It
was a wild sensation as I suddenly "felt" myself gliding
earthward with great speed, "saw" the ground rushing up toward
me, and, with no awareness of transition whatsoever, it
seemed as if I were walking down a street, my eyes roughly
level with those of other pedestrians around me.

There had been no awareness of size at all, no difference to
speak of between the way it felt to be in bird form and what
obviously had to be human form again, walking down the
sidewalk. Either it had been one heck of a large bird or the
Draconian was able to alter its size effortlessly, with no more
awareness of the process than I had of my hair growing. That
did not seem possible. It was a volitional change; there had to
be some sort of awareness. What was more, how could it alter
its size without affecting its mass? In human form, it seemed
to have normal mass for a human. When it had disguised itself
as Stone, it had not seemed any heavier or lighter than it
should have seemed. I hadn't paid any real attention to it then,

190
	$IMON HAWKE

but Breck and I would surely have noticed if "she" was significantly
lighter or heavier than she should have been. That
meant that, as a human, the Draconian had approximately the
same mass and weight as the human whose shape it had
adopted. Yet it had shapechanged to a bird. Unless the bird
had been something the size of a California condor, how could
the Draconian have become smaller without dramatically increasing
the density of its mass? And in that case, how could it
have flown? What the Draconian did, apparently as effortlessly
as I could blink, seemed to contravene known science.
The laws of physics were no different for Draconians than
they were for us. Were they? No, that was impossible. But
then what the hell did I know? I wasn't a physicist. Just trying
to follow secondary school physics had left me hopelessly confused
and feeling like a moron. I had a feeling that the Draconian
was about to provide me with an exquisite revenge.
Wait 'til those physicists get a load of this, I thought.

There was a blurring, dizzying effect, then the image
changed--dim light, a cacophany of street sounds, a strange,
inexplicable throw-focus effect that came in and out, as if
someone were literally playing with the focus on a camera.
At first the focus was directly to the front, with areas on the
periphery blurring into indistinct shapes and colors, then the
effect was reversed, then reversed again, then the field widened,
then narrowed, then widened again.

"Would you believe it?" I heard Breck's disembodied voice
say, as if from somewhere quite far off instead of right next to
me. "The creature is experimenting, learning to control the
biochip."

I suddenly felt cold. Then warm. Then cold again.

It wasn't supposed to be able to do that.

"What the hell is it doing," I asked Breck, hoping to receive
some reassurance, "changing its body temperature?"

My voice sounded normal to me, but Breck's reply again
seemed somewhat distant. "Your guess is as good as mine,"
he said.

"I thought you were supposed to be the resident expert on
shapechangers," I said.

"I suppose I am," he said. "That does not sound very encouraging,
does it?"

"According to the cybernetics staff here," Coles said

	PSYCHODROME
	191

through the interface, cutting into the feed, "the creature is
probably--emphasis on the word probably--altering the biochip
signals rather than its own body temperature. The visual
effect, the blurring focus and so forth, seems to support that
theory. The engineers aren't very happy about this develop-

ment. Apparently, it isn't supposed to be able to do that."
"That's what I thought," I said.
The data feed resumed.

Whip pan. The effect was not unlike that of a video technician
executing what's known as a wipe, in which the camera
appears to pan very swiftly, as if mounted on a speeding vehicle,
so that there was the visual sensation of blurred movement
all in one direction, going from one scene to a completely different
one.

Ground level. Very dim. Shadowy. Foreboding. Concrete
jungle of the lower depths, not unlike Tokyo's Junktown--
djt vu again--proceeding down a dark alleyway, past slithering
shapes and prostrate derelicts moaning in piles of refuse
--descending down a flight of steps and going through a door-way-VOLUME-driving
beat of electronic frenzy--bodies
moving--amplified voices in staccato monotone--the lost
children of the urban basement ghetto congregating in nihilistic
tribal ritual, most of them very young, slack-jawed,
glitter-eyed, robotic-motioned dancing, colliding with each
other and rebounding aimlessly to the rhythmic tempo of a
mechanistic heartbeat--a blasted stage elevated high above the
floor--musicians standing in the rubble, wired for sound,
fingers plucking strings and dancing over keyboards hard-wired
into garish costumes, vocals processed through vocoders
surgically implanted into throats, interface of man and instrument,
the child and the city, the ambience of hopelessness and
dying dreams.

Moving through the crowd--being jostled by the swirling
bodies--scanning--smelling--feeling--standing at the bar
and drinking--recoiling from the harsh, unpleasant taste
--throwing down the glass--it shatters on the bar--no sound
--drowned out by the driving music --bartender sweeps away
the shattered glass without a thought, such an act not
remarkable in such a place, where violence is part of the atmosphere
to be partaken of--

A hand touching the shoulder softly, lingering, sliding

192
	SIMON HAWKE

slowly down the upper arm and stopping at the elbow, moving
up again and down in a caress--a voice close to the ear--very
close--
"Touch
me. Touch me now. Right here."

A hand closing on the wrist and moving it toward a breast
barely contained by an open jacket of synthetic skin, almost
like human flesh--the feel of it, the flap of the jacket being
brushed aside as she moved the hand directly to the breast,
now bared--

Shining eyes in a hard little face, feral-pretty, tall crest of
golden hair ending in a long tail cascading from behind the
neck and down the right side of the chest, body slim and
youthfully coltish, moist lips parted, shallow breathing, the
feeling of a young heart beating, seeking nothing more com-

plicated than momentary physical fulfillment--

End feed.

The skimmer had landed.

"Let's go, you two," the pilot said. "I want to be airborne
and out of here before the screamers in this neighborhood
strip this thing for parts."

"We're losing it," said Coles. "The creature's practically
got the biochip under its control. Best estimate places it at
somewhere within half a mile of your current location. We're
activating every available biochip implantee with the sector.
Be prepared to receive update feeds at any time. I'm going to
boot data up to you as fast as it comes in."

"Wait!" Breck said. "What do you mean by 'available im-plantees'?
And how do you expect us to function if we start
receiving perceptual transmissions without warning? Do you
have any idea how disorienting--"

"I haven't got time to explain everything as I go along,"
said Coles. "I'm going to say this only once, so pay attention.
You two are going to have to thinkfast on your feet. These are
combat conditions, Breck. I'm having all the company records
of former Psychodrome players pulled and sorted, classified
by sectors of the city. We're going to be tapping into every
available biochip in the vicinity where the creature was last
seen. I want to be able to cover every available--"

"Wait a minute!" I said, astonished at what Coles was proposing.
"Have you lost your mind? You can't do that! You
can't just arbitrarily start tapping into people like that! It's
against the law!"

	PSYCHODROME
	193

"We're faced with an alien invasion, O'Toole," said Coles.
"If it would safeguard national security and the interests of
the human race, I'd break every damn law ever written in this
or any other country. Okay, over to your right there, that
looks Ii/ce the place where the creature landed. You should be
getting close."

"I don't think he has any idea what he's doing," I said to
Breck. "He's talking about the most massive invasion of privacy
in human history! The minute he starts tapping into those
people, he's going to have every lawyer in the country screaming
bloody murder. Can he really do that?"

"I think he can," said Breck. "And I fear he knows exactly
what he is doing. Think about it. Are you aware of being
monitored during the game scenarios? You know it is happening,
of course, but are you actually aware of it happening?"

"Jesus," I said. "He's just going to start accessing people
and they're not even going to know it's happening. It's a paranoid's
nightmare."

"It makes you wonder," said Breck. "There are a great
many wealthy, influential individuals who have played the
game at one time or another. People with access to all sorts of
interesting information."

It was a chilling thought. I realized that something like this
had occurred to me before, but I had never followed it
through. Maybe because I had been afraid to. I remembered
thinking when the whole thing started about what Psycho-drome
might one day do with all the people it's been wiring
up. If the government had ever tried to pass a law that every
citizen had to be wired with a biochip capable of interfacing
with a centralized computer network, there would have been
an instant revolution. But make it all a glamorous game with
fabulous sums of money at stake, a recreation for the rich and
famous, a media event, an entertainment, and they'll line up
to buy lottery tickets to take a chance on "winning" the ultimate
fascist prize.

My Russian archbishops were nodding knowingly somewhere
at the back of my subconscious. This was nothing new
to them. The method was different, but the results were still
the same. My Russian ancestors had lived under the most
autocratic, most repressive regime in all of human history.
Absolute power resided in one man or woman--the czar or the
czarina. Absolute power backed up by divine right in a coun-

194
	SIMON HAWKE

try that had no conception whatsoever of what freedom
meant. Catherine the Great had thought nothing of gifting a
departing lover with a palace and four thousand or so peasants.
People had been sold in the marketplace like furniture.
Entire families regarded as possessions, capable of being
bought more cheaply than a horse or hunting dog. Even the
nobility were subject to the whims of the autocracy, told
where and how to live, whom to marry or divorce, even when
to live or die. The Soviet state which had replaced the monarchy
had not been very different. One czar had been replaced
by a council of small-time czars--the Politburo--and things
went on much as before.

Things like this were not supposed to happen in our country
in these modern times. Freedom was a guarantee, taken for
granted. Or had we, after all, merely been sold a bill of goods,
conned into thinking ourselves superior and more privileged,
more liberal and enlightened than our predecessors and all the
other nations of the world? A man like Coles was like a pail of
cold water thrown into the face of all my notions of democracy
and inalienable rights. And a man like Coles did not
spring out of nowhere. He had been nurtured and developed
by a system, a power structure I had never really been aware of
until now.

My great-grandfather, whom my father had been so fond of
quoting to me, had been one of the great iconoclasts and
cynics of his time, an unregenerate technophobe who had disdained
the rules and had a hatred of what he called "the
microchip mentality." He despised the buzzword glorification
of the technostate and had lived on the fringes all his life. He
did not fear computers, but he was afraid of what could be
done with them. He protested against drivers' licenses with
photographs and social security numbers on them,, bank cards
with built-in memory, cashless economy and bureaucratic centralization.
"They've got your number" was an ominous
phrase to him and he had passed on his fringe philosophy to
all his sons and daughters. I had always thought of him as a
paranoid and harmless old eccentric. Now I saw that he had
not been harmless. He had been a dangerous man. The trouble
was there hadn't been enough men like him.

We found the alleyway the creature landed in, the place
where it had shapechanged back to human form. As we

	PSYCHODROME
	195

walked down the darkened corridor between two buildings,
several forms detached themselves from the shadows and
stood in the center of the alley, blocking our way. I glanced
over my shoulder and saw more behind us. Young people. Cy-berpunks.
We were trespassing on their turf and that made us
fair game.
With these kids, artifice was art. They went all out to cultivate
the image of the technoman. Spiky hair in multicolored
rooster crests, the skin of their shaved heads corrugated with
the look of subcutaneous cyberwires, ball-bearing eyes shining
in the dark, teeth bared to show glittering steel incisors.., it
was all cosmetic. In the morning, the corrugated scalps peeled
off, the steel tooth caps were removed, the silvered eye cups
painstakingly taken off and the kids went off to work, if they
were lucky enough to have jobs, or to while the afternoons
away in the labor pool, which basically meant wasting time
standing in line to get their dole. Even if they could afford the
expensive process of cybermodification, the sort of external
appearance they favored would have left them unemployable.
So they settled for the cosmetic look and spending money on
vocoders, which could be surgically implanted or worn externally
(not quite as much cachet), turned on or off as the occasion
warranted. In this case, an ominous presence called for
the vocoders to be on and we were greeted with a grating, electronic
overlay of snake voices hissing from the leader's voice-box.
"Wassss' worth t'ya t'keep ahn Ii-yin'?"
"I have no time for you," said Breck. "Get out of the
way."
"Wasss thisss, hahd mahn, lookin' fuh fasss time, hahd
trade? Dump thissss mu-tha's file!"
Breck pulled off his glove and five long, gleaming nysteel
blades sprang out. He held the blades inches away from the
cyberpunk's face. "If you want hard trade, son, I will be
happy to oblige."
I pulled out my plasma pistol and snapped off a charge at
the feet of the punks behind us. They leaped back from the explosion
of blue. flame and scattered. The snake-voiced cyber-punk
suddenly found himself alone, staring wide-eyed at
Breck's blades.
"Dohn cut me, mahn, pleasssss, pleasssss..."

196
	SIMON HAWKE

"Turn that ridiculous thing off," said Breck.

"Anything you say, man, just don't cut me, all right?
Please?"

"We are looking for a girl," Breck said. "Young, very
pretty in a hard sort of way, golden hair worn in a very long
crest. She was wearing a scarlet skinjac and high black boots,
tattoo of one blue teardrop right here," Breck said, touching
the cyberpunk's cheek with his blades.

"That's a hard-time ride, man. She kills people just for
juice. You're no vark, man, what you want with her?"

"Never mind what I want with her. Where can I find her?"
"I don't owe that damn slit nuthin', man. She's likely back
to her place, picked herself up some new hard meat, radical
lookin' mods, heavy hardware--"

"What the hell is that moron talking about?" Coles said
through the interface,

Breck ignored him and got directions to the girl's place.
"The girl picked up someone new, someone these kids
didn't know," I translated for Coles. "The other terms were
meant to be complimentary, I suppose, describing cosmetic
modifications. Perhaps not so cosmetic in this case. It seems
the alien's shapechanged to a cyberpunk, the better to blend in
down here."

"Okay, it checks," said Coles. "We just received an update
from an implantee in sector three on Ground Level. A former
lottery winner who's a compartment manager in a box warren
on Saint Marks. Visual readout matches the description of the
girl. She was seen entering a building with a young male cyber-punk,
hold it, let me get you a visual.., got it. Stand by..."

Coles was learning quickly. He was using the system as well
as a playermaster and coming up with wrinkles even Mondago
didn't know about. At least I didn't think he knew. I was no
longer sure. I imagined that what Coles had done was activate
every biochip in the ground-level neighborhood he had
designated as sector three, then initiate a centralized scanning
program to monitor every one of them. He had directed the
program to flag a readout containing a visual matching the
girl's description and now he isolated it, enhanced the image
of the male she was with, and booted it up to us.

It was an image like a still frame, enlarged and enhanced
from the original, seen through the eyes of the compartment
manager across the street, who probably had nothing better to

	PSYCHODROME
	197

do than sit at the window of his box warren cubbyhole and
stare outside all day, thinking about the one time he had his
shot and blew it. He had walked away from it with nothing but
the memory of whatever his Psychodrome experience had
been and a biochip implanted in his brain, a semi-organic
microcomputer that had grown together with his brain matter,
always a part of him, always representing his potential. He
could buy computer interface time and have himself programmed
with knowledge that would gain him a new and better
life, but there was, of course, a catch. There always was.
First he had to be able to afford it. If he saved a little every
year, perhaps in another five or ten years he'd have the necessary
funds to buy himself an education. But living where he
lived was not very conducive to saving money. A life-style
such as that required anesthetic. I saw his in the form of the
bottle his hand held before his face. He had been in the process
of lifting the bottle to his mouth when the readout had
been frozen. In the background, a girl dressed in a scarlet skin-jac
and high black boots walked arm in arm with a young male
cyberpunk.

*Enhance.*
*Zoom in.*

I could no longer see the bottle the man was drinking from.
The scene across the street was closer, the focus on the
couple.

*Enhance.*
*Zoom in.*

Their upper bodies and their faces now, close together, apparently
talking to each other.

*Enhance.*

*Zoom in.*

Now just their faces.

*Enhance.*
*Zoom in.*

It was Razin. Only a much younger, cyberpunk version of
Razin, with a tall black crest of spiky hair crowning a corrugated
scalp, exaggerated cheekbones, silvered eyes, snake
fangs protruding over the lower lip.

"It's him," I said, automatically thinking of the Draconian
as "he" when, in fact, I had no idea of its gender or if it even
had one.

"Curious that it should use that face again," said Breck.

I 	198
	SIMON HAWKE
"Almost as if it were expecting.., damn! Coles! If the am-bimorph
has learned how to control its biochip and you have
directed the computers to activate every known biochip in the
sector, then--"
"Shit[" Coles said. "The son of a bitch knows we're scanning
for it! I'm calling in the strike force. Get over there fast.
Move["
We started running hard. The place was only a couple of
blocks away. Breck was in better shape than I and he started
outdistancing me quickly, even while speaking to Coles.
"Coles," he said, "try to feed the Draconian a hallucinact
program. See if you can disorient it. Confuse it long enough
for us to get there."
It was all I could do to stay with him for the first ten or
twenty yards while he spoke to Coles and then he was off and I
couldn't hear him anymore, but I heard Coles replying
through the interface.
"It's no good. We've already tried it. We can't even access
the creature's biochip anymore. It's figured out some way to
block out incoming signals. We've done all we can do from
here."
Breck was outpacing me rapidly, running like a streak
toward Saint Marks Place in one of the most ancient and rundown
neighborhoods of New York City. He was already a full
city block ahead. As I turned into Saint Marks Place, a dimly
lit, blasted avenue with huge cracks in the long untended pavement
and rubble from wrecked buildings lying everywhere, I
saw Breck running full speed into the ruined building where
the cyberpunk girl and the Draconian had gone. I had to stop
for a moment, gasping. I simply couldn't match Brcck's
hybrccd body for speed and strength and stamina. I fought for
breath, telling myself that I probably wouldn't be much help
to him in any case.
And then I saw the girl leaving the building.
It didn't hit me for a second, then I started running, pulling
out my plasma pistol as I ran. I dodged among the wreckage
of what had once, centuries ago, been a stately neighborhood
--handsome building facades on tree-lined streets beneath a
pale blue sky. Now it looked like the aftermath of a fire bombing,
everything cracked and peeling, fallen down and
wounded, no blue sky visible above, not even a polluted

	PSYCHODROME
	199

brown sky, just the dark weight of the city overhead, pressing
down on this sorry excuse for a neighborhood and its even sorrier
inhabitants.

I followed a scarlet skinjac and long sleek legs in high black
boots. I was so winded from the run-I could barely breathe,
yet I forced myself to keep on running, unable to cry out, hoping
Coles was scanning me. I was gaining, getting closer...

The girl heard my running footsteps coming up behind her

and she turned around...

And it was Stone.

I froze in the act of pointing the pistol at her.

"Arkady! Don't! It's me, Stone!"

"O'Toole! Don't kill it! I want that thing alive!"

"Let me go, Arkady. Please. They'll hurt me."

Five skimmers swooped down low over my head and landed
in the street, canopies sliding back, disgorging soldiers armed
with plasma weapons--

And suddenly all hell broke loose. Several plasma blasts
slammed into the street close beside me and one passed so low
over my head that it set me on fire. Instinctively, I dropped
down to the ground and returned the fire, shooting blindly in
the direction from which the plasma blasts had come. I
slapped at my hair and clothing and I rolled, trying to extinguish
the flames. My skin felt scorched from the close
passage of the plasma blasts and I realized I had come within
millimeters of being incinerated.

I was completely out in the open, no cover anywhere. The
best I could do was roll into a huge pothole that only partially
concealed my body. As if lying in a trench, I tried to squeeze
down into the hole and looked quickly from side to side, trying
to find out who was shooting at me and then I saw them,
dodging from doorway to doorway on the opposite side of the
street, black-suited ninjas converging on me and firing as they
ran. There were at least five of them, maybe more.

The soldiers had responded to the fire and they returned it,
some dropping to the ground, some deploying in doorways
and in crumbling basement stairwells.

"Saqqara!" I screamed in an agony of frustration. "God
damn you! Not now! Not now!"

The street became a war zone and I was caught right in the
crossfire. I couldn't move. Plasma blasts were passing so low

2,00
	SIMON HAWKE

over my head that I could feel their heat. They slammed into
the building walls behind me and the ancient tenements began
to burn. I heard screaming.

I was back in the jungle, slogging through the swamps as
auto pulser fire and plasma rockets landed all around me. I
saw insects buzzing in front of my eyes and I seemed to feel
them crawling up on me, I felt them right through the combat
armor, I felt the heat, the sweat running down my body, I
couldn't breathe and I began to scream, a long, drawn-out,
throat-rending scream of killer fury.

My scream was suddenly joined in chorus with another and
I looked up to see a ninja, black garments wreathed in flames,
wailing like a banshee as he dove down at me. I fired. The
plasma hit his chest point-blank and he became a fireball.

I ducked beneath the burning human remnants and started
running in serpentine, looking for cover. I dove into a doorway
and pressed myself flat against the wall, firing across the
street. Another ninja went down in flames. Plasma charges
were whumping into building walls and panicked people were
running out into the street, right into the line of fire. One
woman was stark naked. She took five or six steps before a
stray blast hit her and a flaming hulk fell to the cratered street.

The soldiers had no idea what was happening. They were
merely reacting as they had been trained to do. They had been
sent in to capture an alien creature and now suddenly they
were facing heavy opposition from an unknown enemy. So
they did the only thing they could do, which was to turn their
attention on the unknown attacking force. The ninjas couldn't
have known what it was all about. Breck had been right.
Someone had been watching for us at game headquarters and
we had been tailed expertly by warriors of the Silent Way.
They had chosen their time to strike and, without warning,
their lone target had suddenly been joined by several platoons
of SS commandos. And the innocent paupers who lived down
here in squalor and quiet misery now had a war in the Street
outside their homes.

I don't know how long it lasted, but it must have been over
fairly quickly. It hadn't seemed quick, though. As I huddled
in the doorway, staring wildly out into the street, trying to
separate the fleeing bodies of civilians from any black-clad
assassins running toward me, the plasma fire died away and
left only the screaming of the people in the burning buildings.

	PSYCHODROME
	201

It was over. The ninjas were all dead, as well as a good number
of the soldiers. There was no sign of the alien.

I forced my mind to block out the image of the burning
jungle and mercenaries moving ponderously in heavy combat
armor. I now saw only the flames, the blackened stone of ancient
buildings, and the ruptured street littered with burning
bodies. Breck!

I ran back toward the building where the girl had lived. I
racked my brain for the apartment number the cyberpunk had
given us. What was it? Third floor! 3-G! I took the littered
stairs three at a time, slipped in a pile of garbage on the stairwell,
caught myself on the railing, and lunged up the final
flight of steps, the breath rasping in my throat. The door to
3-G was open.

Breck was lying on the floor inside, his head bleeding. He
was stirring, groaning softly. I found the girl inside the filthy
bedroom. The room was bathed in blood. She had been
slaughtered like an animal, her chest torn open, entrails hanging
out upon the floor. Written on the wall, in blood, was the
chilling phrase "Now it begins." I doubled over and became
violently ill.

I felt someone steadying me and when I straightened up, I
saw Breck standing beside me, staring into the bedroom with

glazed eyes. Blood was running down the side of his face.
"My God," he said.

I turned away from the horror.

"You're hurt," said Breck. "What happened?"

"I had it," I said. "I had it cornered. The soldiers landed
and I thought we had the thing and then a squad of ninjas
came out of nowhere and opened up with plasma weapons.
The whole damn neighborhood's on fire. Everywhere, people

dead... Saqqara. That son of a bitch Saqqara!"

"Coles?" said Breck. "Coles!"

There was no response. Coles had lost the alien and he was
probably beside himself. He had no time for us.

I started crying. I clung to Breck and wept like a baby. He
held me in his arms. I felt his blood dripping down onto my
face.

Breck took a deep breath and let it out slowly. "Come on,"
he said. "Let's get out of here. You and I have a score to settle
on the Ginza Strip."

-TWELVE-

The Ginza looked the same as I remembered it. There was no
reason for it to have changed, but it felt as if I had been away
for years. The light show still illuminated the Strip with a symphony
of color, the shills still worked the sidewalks, the
scooters still terrorized pedestrians. One thing had changed,
though. The Pyramid Club was under new management.

The young lycra-suited bouncers at the door did not look as
elegant as Saqqara's people had, but they looked just as
tough. One of them remembered me. He buzzed the office and
spoke a few words too softy for me to overhear, then Breck
and I were politely escorted inside the club.

I remembered hearing they had trashed the place, but it had
been rebuilt the same way as before. Business was brisk, even
though the patrons were not quite as stylish as the crowd Saq-qara
had once catered to. We were escorted up a plushly carpeted
stairway to an office on the upper floor, the same office
where I had once stood before Saqqara, with his bodyguards
behind me, desperately trying to fast-talk myself into a few

202

	- PSYCHODROME
	203

more hours of life. A lot had happened since then. That
frightened con artist I remembered seemed like a completely
different person. It was hard to believe that had been me.

Coles had been livid. He had lost all track of the Draconian.
His only lead to the shapechanger infiltration and now it was
gone! There had already been one "incident." One of the offices
of the Draconis Combine in Paris had been blown up and
the news media had received a message claiming responsibility
and threatening more terrorist acts "if humans did not abandon
their interests on Draconis 9." The news reports had
made no mention of anyone claiming responsibility for the explosion.
Apparently, Coles had hushed it up, but no one
would be able to keep it under wraps for long if it continued.

"I don't have time to waste on petty criminals in Tokyo,"
Coles had said, "but I have a personal grudge against one in
particular. Do what you have to do and get back quickly.
Don't worry about any consequences. I'll arrange to clean up
after you. But get the job done. Permanently."

Our escort knocked at the office door and someone opened
it from inside. The bandit stood aside to let us enter and I saw
the new proprietor of the establishment seated at the desk,
dressed in high boots and a sleek black lycra suit that left little
to the imagination.

"Hello, Kami," I said.

She got up and came around the desk, leaned back against
the front of it, and stared at me for a moment, then she
smiled. "Konnichi wa, O'Toole."

We stood staring at each other, not saying anything, then
she reached out and grabbed a fistful of my shirt and pulled
me to her. Our arms went around each other and, after a long
time, I finally remembered to introduce my friend, Rudiger
Breck, who seemed to find the whole thing quite amusing.

The gang war was all over. Apparently, the shoguns of the
Yakuza saw no percentage in wasting time and money and
receiving lots of unfavorable publicity all over a few gaming
interests on the Ginza. They were not very happy with Hakin
Saqqara. Word had come down to stop the nonsense and get
back to business. For a man of his position, he had exercised
poor judgment in the whole affair and his stock in the organization
was not high. According to Kami, he kept a very low
profile these days, even lower than before, which meant he

SIMON HAWKE

had become a virtual recluse. He had a great deal of ground to
make up, a reputation to rebuild, and all the money in the
world would not buy back the "honor" he had lost because of
me. I had become his grand obsession, the bte noire of his
existence, and word on the street was that a person could
secure some valuable connections and make a tidy piece of
change if they brought reasonable proof of my demise.

Fortunately, I had the "tiger lady" on my side, as Kami was
now referred to on the Strip. The bandits ruled the Ginza now
and they had made it known that they would not be very
pleased with anyone who undertook a contract against me.
Needless to say, this did not intimidate the ninja guild, but it
was a strong deterrent to the independent contractors. I was
safer on the Ginza than I would have been back in New York.
Especially with Kami's bandits to protect me. She had brought
all the bandit gangs together when the war had started and she
kept them together now, under her leadership and that of a
"senior council." She had become a warlord in her own right
and she wore the mantle well.

Her new role in life had changed her. She was learning how
to be a businesswoman. She was a bit more talkative, though
still on the quiet side by most people's standards. She did not
waste words. She still did not own a dress and she still took
pride in her status and appearance as a bandit shogun. The
long scar on her face was still there, though she could now
easily afford to have cosmetic surgery remove it. I was glad
she hadn't. For me, it had become a vital part of her.

We spent that first night back together making love and
catching up. Breck had not been left entirely to his own
devices. The bandits have their own ways of making an honored
guest feel welcome and Kami had seen to my friend's
comfort. The Pyramid Club still boasted a full complement of
lovely ladies.

In spite of being sworn to secrecy by Coles, I told her everything.
To hell with Coles. I was on my own time and I was
never much for following orders. I make my own decisions
about whom to trust and I trusted Kami more than I would
ever trust a man like Coles. If he was keeping tabs on me
through my biochip, I'd soon find out by breaching security.
But no voices came to me through the interface and I began to
think he meant it when he said he would respect my privacy.
Strange man. I couldn't figure him out at all.

	PSYCHODROME
	205

Kami listened to it all without comment and when I got to
the part about Stone's death, my voice broke and she gently
touched my cheek. It was a long unburdening that took most
of the night, but when I had finished, I felt much better and
we held each other for a while, enjoying that same special
closeness we had shared before. It wasn't the same as it had
been with Stone, but in a strange way, it felt somehow better.
And as I thought about it more, it seemed less strange.

The Ginza had shaped us both and made us what we were.
We understood each other. There was no need for questions,
explanations, or verbalizing feelings. We were both street
people and we would remain street people, no matter where we
went or what our fortunes were. Ours was not a great romance.
There was no unbridled passion, no emotional outpourings,
no driving need to form an artificial bond we'd have
to work to reinforce so that it would still hold us together
when the novelty wore off. Instead, there was companionship,
shared warmth, natural trust, and understanding, that indefinable
something that made us both together a better thing
than we were on our own. After all this time, we were back together
and it was like we never left. There was a lot to be said
for a relationship like that. It was not important to define it,
but it was important to think hard before walking out on it
again.

"We have unfinished business with Saqqara," she said at
the end, "but we do not know where he is."

"I know," I said. "There is a man named Coles who's very
good at finding things."

She nodded. "Good. Tomorrow, then."

Saqqara had done very well with the seeds I had provided
him. He now had a penthouse suite high atop Hamamatsu
Tower. It was a security building in one of Tokyo's most expensive
districts and Saqqara had augmented the security considerably.
The sole way up to the penthouse was via lift tube
and the tube only went as far as the floor below Saqqara's
penthouse. That floor was controlled by Saqqara. It held his
corporate offices and security staff headquarters. There was a
separate lift tube connecting that floor to the penthouse suite
above. The only other access to the penthouse was by the
skimmer pad, which was covered by gun emplacements. The
entire complex was heavily guarded and scanned at every con-

SIMON HAWKE

ceivable access point by cameras. Not a few bandits had died
trying to get inside. Only Saqqara wasn't there. Coles had
tracked him down and located him in the least likely of places
--Junktown.

It was the last place anyone would have thought of looking
for him. The war with the bandits had made Saqqara paranoid
and had brought home to him the knowledge of his own vulnerability.
He had counted on his power and position, on the
fact that only someone truly crazy would risk trying anything
against a warlord of the Yakuza. The bandits were truly crazy.
They just didn't give a damn.

Saqqara had lost a good many of his people in the conflict
and he had almost lost his own life on at least three separate
occasions. He had gone underground--literally--in a ground-level
block of Junktown he had purchased through a number
of false fronts so that his ownership was almost impossible to
trace. Under ordinary circumstances, it would have been impossible,
but ordinary circumstances did not take into account
the resources of a man like Coles.

From the outside, Saqqara's new headquarters looked no
different from any other seedy residence in Junktown--a
crumbling block of box warrens, tiny cubicle apartments.
Little closet-sized coffins for the living, just like the place
where all of this had started for me when I woke in the
cramped living quarters of Miko's nonreg family. No one ever
saw the light of day down here. The poorest of the city's poor
dwelt in a perpetual urban night. Few could afford power.
Campfires burned in the middle of the streets, surrounded by
tattered tents, home to those who could find no other housing.
People lived and died here and they died more often than they
lived, buried beneath a city which had closed its eyes to their
existence. But behind the ruined facades of the block Saqqara
had purchased, there was a luxurious complex built inside the
gutted buildings. Here Saqqara lived, in palatial splendor,
isolated from the squalor all around him. He had withdrawn
to lick his wounds and shore up his power base, to prepare for
his next move in the tangled world of corporate high finance.

Coles had a staff of highly trained investigators take a can
opener to his corporate interests, stripping away the covering
layers by raiding data bases and corporate computer records,
bypassing sophisticated security programs and tracing down
the leads that led to the spider at the center of his web. Saq-

	PSYCHODROME
	207

qara had disappeared in Tokyo, but he was getting ready to
resurface. While he ran his financial empire from his secret
hideaway, he had been buying real estate and establishing new
businesses, few of which could stand very close scrutiny. It
seemed he was about to liquefy his Tokyo assets and reappear
in Los Angeles, with a new identity and new corporate holdings
which he had been carefully establishing. He was going to
impress his bosses in the Yakuza with his massive upward mo-

bility and gift them with new territory all at once.

Not if I could help it.

Breck had surveyed the outside of Saqqara's hideout with a
practiced eye and he returned to us where we were waiting
around a campfire built up in a rusted barrel in the ruins of an
old tenement building across the street. We looked like a
miserable group of derelicts in shabby, tattered robes. Beneath
the robes, we were wearing lycra suits and leathers, belt and
shoulder holsters, concha belts holding the deadly buzz discs.
We had our helmets wrapped up inside the shapeless bags we
carried. No one could tell that spread out in small groups
among the city's nonregistered derelicts were over one hundred
young scooter bandits, spoiling for a fight.

"Your friend Saqqara seems to know his business," Breck
said as he warmed his hands over the fire. "The building entrances
are probably all false fronts. Security personnel disguised
as very unfriendly nonreg tenants, box warren cubicles
masking the interior construction strategically placed to cover
the street from all angles, like fortified pillboxes. My guess is
that none of the entrances we see from the outside are actual
entrances to the complex. They've probably been sealed. The
real entrances are camouflaged."

"How can you be sure?" I said.

"I saw several men leaving the building," Breck said,
"going in different directions. I followed one of them and he
doubled back to join up with the others a block away. They
went down into one of the old underground subway terminals.
It looked like a change of shift with the security, disguised to
look like ordinary comings and goings in the building."

"There has to be a tunnel connecting to the subway," I
said. "There's no other reason why they'd be going down
there. Nobody goes down into the old subways."

"Unless, perhaps, they are armed with plasma weapons,"
Breck said. He looked at Kami. "It took a great deal of

208
	SIMON H^WKE

trouble and expense to set this up. You must have really

frightened the poor man."

She smiled.

"We have watched his home in Hamamatsu Tower for
months," one of the other bandits said. "We never thought to
seek him here."

"Small wonder this man was so upset with you, O'Toole,"
said Breck. "You cost him prestige with his organization and
when they refused to support him in his personal vendetta, he
was forced to leave his penthouse and make a nest for himself
here in the slums. A comfortable nest, to be sure, but it must
have been quite an affront to his dignity and pride. One of the
wealthiest and most powerful men in Tokyo, forced to hide
out from a band of street urchins."

"Is that how we seem to you, Breck-san?" Kami said.

"Sorry, I meant no offense," said Breck. "It takes nerve to
go up against professional talent."

"We have our own talents," Kami said.

"Do you?" Breck said. "All right, then, how do you plan
to gain access to Saqqara's stronghold without alerting him?
You can be sure he has at least several escape routes. If you try
a frontal assault, he will be long gone before you can break
in."

"Then we will not do it that way," said Kami. She turned
and spoke to several of the bandits in rapid Japanese. They
nodded and departed quickly.

Breck looked at me and raised his eyebrows.

"There's going to be a changing of the guard," I said.
"This should prove interesting."

We followed Kami to a spot opposite the crumbling entrance
to the subway and waited in the shadows. "Make yourself
comfortable," I told Breck. "This may take a while."

We waited until it was time for the next security shift
change. The shift coming on came up out of the subway and
split up, going in different directions. After a short while, the
shift coming off duty appeared. Two men dressed in shabby
hooded coats approached the subway entrance. From across
the street, another two men came. Two more appeared from a
side street and another two from an alleyway. They all converged
a short distance away; then all eight started to come
directly toward us. Breck reached for his sidearm, but Kami
caught his hand and shook her head, smiling. The men

	PSYCHODROME
	209

reached us and started to remove their cloaks. They were all
bandits.

Breck chuckled. "Nicely done," he said.

The bandits had taken advantage of the weak point in the
arrangements. In order to make the change in shifts appear
like normal arrivals and departures from the box warren, the
security men did not leave all at once and they always went in
different directions before they reformed about a block away
by the subway entrance. They had grown careless, dependent
upon their weapons, contemptuous of the beaten-down people
of Junktown, even the most desperate of whom were no match
for a trained pro with a plasma weapon. The bandits had followed
them as they left the building complex and taken them
out one at a time. They stripped them, took their weapons,
and rendezvoused as planned outside the subway entrance. We
took their hooded cloaks and put them on, then joined the
other bandits and went down into the subway.

We walked in total darkness for a while, moving slowly and
cautiously. Once, many years ago, these underground tunnels
had been a vitaLpart of Tokyo's mass transit system. Crowds
of people moved through these subterranean passageways,
hurrying to catch electric trains which wound ceaselessly
through the tunnels underneath the city, delivering citizens to
various terminal points beneath the streets. The spanways and
the conveyer tubes had changed all that as the city had grown
upward, the only direction left for it grow, and as the towers
of Tokyo reached higher and higher, the nether sections of the
city had fallen into disrepair until now, like the floor of Tokyo
Bay beneath the pilings that supported the floating cities, there
was only mire and darkness here and the inhabitants moved
through the murk like scuttlefish. The subway tunnels, many
of which had long since collapsed, leaving gaping fissures in
the ancient streets, wound through the ground beneath the city
like catacombs.

There were creatures down here, creatures who had long
since ceased to be people. Like trap-door spiders, they preyed
on the unwary, on the weak, on those too tired or too desperate
to flee. They kept to the darkness of the tunnel entrances
and if anyone was careless enough to venture too close, they
would swarm out in small groups and drag the hapless victim
underground and, for a while, they would have food.

We saw no such creatures, however. No doubt they had

210
	SIMO HAWKE

learned to avoid this section of the subway. We encountered
no one as we walked through the passageway, hearing only the
ho of our footsteps. Brk, who saw better in the dark,
spoke soffiy to us when we were about halfway down the passageway.
"Careful," he said. "Keep your hoods over your faces. There are infrared scanners mounted on the wall ahead."
As we passed that point, Breck gave a casual wave. Soon we
saw a light at a bend in the passageway. It opened out into a
well-lit plaza. There was a glass-enclosed booth with a guard
stationed inside, watching a small bank of screens.
Kami grabbed our arms. "Support me," she said.
She sagged down as if hurt or ill. We supported her on
either side, practically dragging her forward. The guard in the
booth saw us approaching and frowned. He stuck his head
out.
"What's wrong?" he said, speaking in gutter Japanese.
Kami moved swiftly. She reached inside her cloak and
straightened up fast, letting fly with a buzz disc. It whirred
toward the guard and embedded itself in his forehead, the tiny
spinning blades slicing deeply into the bone.
Breck ran to the glass booth. Two guards came running into
the plaza from a side tunnel and a couple of the bandits hurled
their buzz discs, dropping the men in their tracks. Kami and I
joined Breck in the booth. He was studying the control panel.
"We appear to be in luck," he said. "These screens are
monitors for the tunnels in the immediate vicinity. This is the
centralized station for all the scanners to the tunnel entrances. There are three more besides this one, all connecting to this
terminal. Here's the alarm switch. This was not very well
thought out. They should have had the monitor station
located within the complex itself rather than the subway terminal.''
He grinned. "This is what comes of cutting costs."
Kami spoke to a couple of the bandits and they went running
back down the passageway toward the subway entrance.
Within a short while, armed bandits were streaming down the
passageway and filling up the plaza. We went out across the
platform and jumped down onto the tracks, moving silently
into the subway tunnel, leaving bandits stationed along the
way. We were moving back in the direction of the complex.
There was a flood of light up ahead, coming from the side of
the tunnel wall. We approached it cautiously. It was an open

	PSYCHODROME
	211

'passageway, branching off from the subway tunnel and head-lng
straight back beneath Saqqara's complex. There was a
heavy door at the far end.

"Scanner just above the door," said Breck. "No way to
avoid it. This could pose a problem."

Kami beckoned a couple of the bandits forward and spoke
to them quickly. Then, to Breck's astonishment, she started to
strip. She took off her cloak and removed her weapons, handing
them to one of the other bandits, who hid them underneath
his cloak. In moments, she was completely naked save
for her boots. She issued a curt command to one of the bandits,
who said, "Hai," and then struck her hard across the
mouth. Her head snapped back and her mouth started to
bleed.

"What the hell..." said Breck.

Another carefully executed blow bloodied her nose. She
didn't cry out once. Two of the bandits held her between then,
one holding each arm; two more took up position behind
them. As she pretended to struggle, they started walking with
her down the tunnel, half dragging her, laughing loudly and
talking among themselves.

Breck shook his head as he watched them heading down the
passageway toward the scanner above the door. "That is an
amazing woman," he said. "I have no idea what she sees in
you, O'Toole, but allow me to give you some advice. Never
make her angry."

They reached the door. It opened. We waited a moment,
then heard the high-pitched whine of zip guns. I shouted and
we went running down the tunnel at top speed. It was all over
by the time we got there. The guards had been disposed of and
Kami, ignoring the blood running down her face, was quietly
and quickly getting dressed and buckling on her weapons.
There had been no time for them to sound an alarm. We had
breached the complex. Several of the bandits came forward,
holding a wounded guard between them. Kami wiped the

blood away from her face and approached him.
"Where is Saqqara?" she said in Japanese.
The guard spat at her.

She calmly reached out with her right hand and, with a
quick flick of her index finger, popped his left eye out of its
socket. The man screamed horribly. I felt my gorge rising and
I fought it down. She repeated her question. This time, she got

212
	SIMON HAWKE

an answer. The interrogation was very brief. One of the bandits
grabbed the guard by the hair and jerked hard, snapping
the man's head back. Kami hit him hard across the throat and
finished him.

Saqqara's people never knew what hit them. The bandits
fanned out through the complex, pouring out of the lift tubes
and the stairways, slaughtering everyone in sight, trashing the
place. We found Saqqara in his bedroom on the top floor of
the complex, wearing a long black brocade dressing gown.
Two terrified young girls were huddled together on the
bed, clutching the covers to themselves. In spite of being surrounded
by armed bandits, Saqqara seemed calm and self-possessed
as we walked in. He turned to face us, utterly in
control, self-assured, as elegant as ever.

"O'Toole," he said softly, his eyes widening slightly. "And
the Tiger Lady herself." He smiled wryly. "This is all quite
impressive, my dear," he said to Kami. "I had truly underestimated
you. My congratulations. And O'Toole, it seems I
had underestimated you, all along. I never thought you would
be so difficult to kill, much less that you would wind up killing

me. That is, of course, the object of this exercise, I assume?"
"You didn't leave us any choice, Hakim," I said.

He nodded. "I suppose not. I really should have called your
bluff when you drew to that inside straight. You were good. I

was convinced you had it. It was a bluff, wasn't it?"

"You didn't pay to see the cards," I said.

He smiled. "Once a hustler, always a hustler," he said.
"But you were small-time, O'Toole. I made you. Always remember
that." He glanced at Breck. "Mr. Breck, is it not? I
haven't had the pleasure. I have been quite a fan of yours."

He came forward toward Breck and held out his hand, as if
we were guests in his home. Breck wordlessly held out his
hand, then suddenly released his blades. Saqqara hesitated,
staring at their razor-sharp edges, his hand still held out, motionless.

"Ah, yes, that interesting hand of yours," he said. "I had
thought that you, at least, being a former military officer,
would have the grace to observe some of the courtesies."

"Your hired assassins were not very courteous toward my
fellow hybreeds at Draconis Base," said Breck. "I do not forget
such things. And you have interfered in a great deal more
than you realize."

	PSYCHODROME
	213

"Indeed.9 Well, that is a pity. I had not meant to offend
you. It was only O'Toole I wanted. I regret the loss of your
comrades. It may not be much, but allow a dead man to offer
his most sincere and abject apology. Please."

He carefully reached around the blades and took Breck's
nysteel wrist in both his hands. "I am sorry," he said, looking
into Breck's eyes. "It seems I have not played my cards well.
But at least I can deny O'Toole the trump."

He suddenly jerked forward and impaled himself on Breck's
hand. He gasped and his eyes opened wide. Breck, startled,
started to pull away, but Saqqara held onto him with all his
strength. Breck jerked his hand back, breaking Saqqara's
hold, and the man slowly sank down to his knees. He looked
up at me and smiled.

"Perhaps not the formal way to observe the old tradition of
seppuku," Saqqara said, gasping with pain, "--but one does
what one can."

I watched him as his life ebbed away and it occurred to me
that he had died as he had lived. With style. And I didn't
understand it. I didn't understand it at all. I gained no satisfaction
from it. I just stood there and watched him die.

-EPILOGUE-

The game was over and I had somehow managed to survive.
Purely by chance. Everything in my life seemed to have happened
by chance. Chance led me to marry Miko while I was in
a drunken state; chance saved me from a life of quiet desperation
down in Junkdown; chance led me to The Pyramid Club
and made my path cross Hakim Saqqara's. I took a chance,
bet everything on a turn of the cards and won, but I had lost
my winnings in the large game Saqqara played with me. And
when everything seemed blackest, I won the one chance in a
trillion at the lottery and escaped Saqqara's men, thanks to a
chance encounter with Kami's bandit squadron. But I had escaped
only to play another, even larger game of chance, one
that had come close to killing me. The game was over, as far as
the home audience was concerned, but for me, it was only just
beginning. One game ends, another starts, the stakes keep getting
bigger. It seemed I had no control at all. Does anybody?

It all came down to chance. I could not escape the strange

214

	PSYCHODROME
	215

tricks of my leprechauns nor the gloomy fatalism of my Russian
ancestors. The leprechauns were gamblers; the archbishops
were survivors. Somewhere between the two there was
a balance point on which I was precariously perched, compelled
to spend my life forever taking chances, living on the
ragged edge of dreams.

The shuttle to New York was leaving in ten minutes and I
was going to be on it. Breck and I sat in the bar, drinking coffee.
We hadn't said a word in half an hour.

"It's still ten minutes," Breck said, breaking the silence finally.

"What?"

"That was the fourth time you've checked your watch in the

past thirty seconds."

"Oh."

"Would it help to talk?"
"I don't know."
"You want to stay?"

I shook my head. "I can't. It's not my my world anymore,
Rudy. Maybe it was once, but not anymore. Even if Coles
would let me stay, which I somehow doubt, there's a little
thing inside my head that's changed the game on me. I can't

just pretend it isn't there. I can't go back."

"I know the feeling," Breck said.

"I guess you do. You know, it's funny, but the first time I
met you, I didn't like you very much. I didn't trust you. I
thought you were only out for yourself. You had this big reputation
as the game's number-one villain, but you've proved
to be a good friend, Rudy."

He smiled. "And the first time I met you, I was convinced
you would quit after the first scenario. That is, if you managed
to survive it. You talked a good game, but I did not
believe you had the nerve for it. I am glad I was wrong. I suppose
it only proves that people are not always what they
seem."

"Unfortunate choice of words, under the circumstances," I
said, thinking of the ambimorph. I stared into my coffee. "I
wonder what our friend Coles, the thought cop, intends to do
with us. You think we're going to be drafted into his spook
army?"

"We know much more than we should," said Breck. "That

216
	SIMON HAWKE

pUtS uS on the inside, as Coles would probably say. It appears
you have bought into yet another high-stakes game,
O'Toole."
"Yeah, and I probably can't afford this one, either. But
what the hell, that's never stopped me before."
Breck grinned, then became silent for a moment. "You
wanted to know about me and Stonem''
I shook my head. "Forget it."
"It seemed important to you at the time. I know it bothered
you. Perhaps it makes no difference now, but if it would help
settle anything between
"Friends don't need to ask for explanations," I said, "and
you don't owe me any. Stone didn't, either."
Breck nodded.
"What's bothering me right now is something a great deal
more important," I said. "You think Coles or whoever was
behind him was in on this thing all along?"
"I'm not sure what you mean. You're referring to the
game?"
I nodded. "I just keep thinking about how quickly they
moved in. Coles seemed to adapt to the process as if he'd been
a playermaster for years."
"I've thought about that, too. The game seems to have the
potential to be far more than a mere game. It makes me
wonder how far that potential has been explored by Coles or
by people like him. It's an unsettling thought."
"It's all a game in the end," I said. "The game of power.
People like Coles seem to control all the pieces. They write all
the rules. But the ambimorphs are going to add a few new
wrinkles. It's a whole new game now and I've been thinking
about how the rules are going to be rewritten. What you said
about them sterilizing Draconis..." I shook my head. "...I
don't think they're going to do it."
Breck raised his eyebrows. "What makes you think so? It
would be the logical thing to do. They would be crazy not to."
"Yes, well, I haven't noticed that the universe is particularly
logical, but I have noticed that it's crazy. If they sterilized
Draconis 9, it would be essentially unusable for years,
wouldn't it?"
"I should think it would take at least several generations to
repair the damage," Breck said, "assuming an all-out commitment.''

	PSYCHODROME
	217

"You think anybody really wants to pay for that?" I said.
"I doubt the Combine will have much choice."

"It isn't only the Combine that would be affected," I said.
"It's Coles and the people he represents, as well. They need
the fire crystals for their tachyon drives and weapons systems
and whatever. They might well find another source, but it
would be expensive, as would be the clean-up of Draconis
after a surgical strike. Plus there's one other consideration.
There's no way of knowing how many ambimorphs have managed
to break the quarantine. A surgical strike against their
home world is the one thing Coles has to hold over them. It's
the one basis for some kind of negotiation. Burn out Draconis
and there won't be anything left to hold back the ambimorphs
who've made it to Earth and to the colony worlds."

Breck stared at me for a long moment. "You are beginning
to sound like Coles."

"I'm trying to figure out how the man thinks," I said. "All
of a sudden, I'm sitting down at the table with him and he's
got all the chips and all the cards. I could have burned that
ambimorph, but Coles wanted it live. You're a soldier, Rudy,
you're trained to think in terms of defeating the opposition.
Try thinking like a politician, in terms of cost-effectiveness,
deals and trade-offs. It's a lot like being in a poker game,
when you come to think of it. We've got 'x' number of ambi-morphs
who've broken the quarantine and are posing a threat
--that's the hand the other player's got, the cards you can't
see. You know the other guy's got a good hand, but you don't
know how good. You have no way of knowing if what you've

got can beat it."

Breck nodded.

"So what do you do?" I said. "If you call and he's got you
beat, he take the pot and you're effectively out of the game,
because if you lose the pot, you've only got enough to maybe
make it through another hand or two and it'll cost you everything
you've got left. Odds of coming out ahead are nonexistent;
odds of coming out even are poor, at best. What
you've put into the pot is Earth and the colony worlds. What
he's put in is Draconis 9. You haven't put in everything,
you've each got some left in reserve, but not a lot. Not enough
that either of.you can afford to throw in your hand."

"So what does the prudent gambler do?" said Breck.

I grimaced. "There's no such thing as a prudent gambler.

218
	SIMON HAWKE

There are only amateurs and pros. The amateur plays
hunches. The pro goes with the odds. And we're all pros at
this table. Suppose we act like amateurs and throw in everything
we've got on one big raise and call his bluff. We snuff
Draconis. Call. And he lays down a royal flush. A staggering
number of ambimorphs infiltrated into human society, penetrated
into key positions, nothing holding them back from
all-out war. Read 'em and weep. But being pros, are we going
to take that chance? No. That isn't smart. Instead, what we're
going to do is call on everything we've got, all our professional
experience, and test each other's nerve. We're going to raise
each other a little at a time, watching the other guy's face
carefully, looking for anything, the slightest tick, the smallest
bead of sweat, the tiniest flicker in the eyes that gives us a better
idea of what the odds are, of just how good a hand he's got
and just how confident he is. And we're going to hope like hell
our own poker face won't crack and that his will before we've
used up all of our reserve. We're looking for a break in his
concentration--one ambimorph or more, to lock away somewhere
in a lab and study, figure out how to detect the bastards
so we can get the infiltrators and wipe them out on Draconis
without having to resort to a surgical strike that would damage
the planet for years to come."

"And where do we come in? You and I? How do we fit into
this game?" said Breck.

"We're the bluff cards that are filling out the hand," I
said. "Or maybe we're the ones Coles is thinking of discarding.
Depends on how things go, I guess. Maybe he'll throw out
some other cards and draw something that will reinforce us.
Who the hell knows? But he's the one holding the hand, the
way I see it. And Psychodrome just happens to be the table
we're all sitting at. We know there are a lot of people out there
with biochips hardwired into their brains. And at least one
ambimorph, who has apparently learned how to control it.
And other ambimorphs could probably get biochips the same
way ours got his. That links us all in the same game. Them, us,
and the public out there who tune into the game."

"Only the moment word gets out about this," Breck said,
"the public will panic. At the very least, they'll stop tuning
in."

"I've thought about that," I said. "I tried thinking about it

	PSYCHODROME
	219

the same way Coles would. And you know what I decided I'd
do in his place? I'll tell you something, I don't know what
scares me more, the fact that I could think this way or the fact
that this is probably just what Coles will do. Instead of trying
to stop any of this from getting out, I would go public with it.
Only I would go public with it as a lie. It isn't really happening.
It's all part of the game, a brand new wrinkle, a new and
continuing scenario for Psychodrome--the alien invasion."
"Now you're getting carried away," said Breck. "It would
never work. The moment the ambimorphs committed their
first significant terrorist act, it would all be out in the open."
"Not if it's part of the game," I said. "That's the beauty of
it. And the horror of it, too. Anything you can hush up to
large extent, you pass off as a hallucinact. Otherwise, you establish
that the game is incorporating reality into its scenarios,
something it's already doing anyway, only now various 'isolated
incidents' of violence are going to be incorporated into
one so-called conspiracy, a fictional alien invasion--some
building blows up somewhere, killing 'x' amount of people,
and it was actually some sort of accident, you see, but it
becomes incorporated into the alien invasion scenario. Any
statement claiming that the Draconians were responsible becomes
accepted by the media and the public as a press release
from Psychodrome, taking advantage of a real-life event to
publicize a game scenario."
"They'd never get away with it," said Breck. "At the very
least, relatives of those killed in terrorist acts would institute
legal proceedings against the game."
"On what grounds?" I said. "There's no law against basing
a fictional entertainment on real-life news events which are
public domain. Besides, Coles and his people own the system.
If anyone got in their way and threatened to expose it all,
they'd simply be squashed like a bug. Remember what Coles
said? He'd break every law ever written to safeguard the
security of the human race. He sees himself as the man with
the Holy Grail. And for all I know, maybe he is, God help us.
He's already co-opted us. Do you recall him asking? You want
to test his resolve? Miss the shuttle. Go to the press. See what
happens."
They announced the boarding call for the shuttle to New
York. For a moment, Breck acted as if he hadn't heard it. For

	220
	SIMON HAWK£

a moment, I thought he was actually considering my suggestion,
but then he looked up at me with a strange expression on
his face and got up to leave.

"It appears she didn't come," he said, looking around.

I thought back to the last time I had left Japan. It seemed
like a century ago. I wondered if there would ever be a next
time.

"Kami's not much for good-byes," I said.

As we stepped onto the slideway, Breck gave me a nudge. I
turned in the direction he was looking and I saw her, dressed
in black and silver lycras, standing at the bottom of the ramp,
flanked by a couple of young bandits. She wasn't the type to
wave, but she gave me a slight nod, then turned on her heel

and walked away without a backward glance.
"Unusual young woman," Breck said.
"Yes. She certainly is that."

I was still smiling as the shuttle lifted off. Maybe it was
crazy. I was just a little ball in a runaway roulette wheel, popping
into one slot after another as it went around, one with a
homicidal youth gang leader who was both the most frightening
and the most compelling woman I had ever known; one
with an ex-commando of the Special Service who was far better
equipped to deal with the hammerblows of life than I was,
so I wasn't sure how I'd ever manage to keep up; one with a
man named Coles, who saw me as nothing more than just
another chip in the very large pile of chips he played with and
one with Hakim Saqqara--who had started out holding all the
cards and had wound up busted. You win a few, you lose a
few. I had won that one. I had won it big. But the game continued
at a breakneck pace. Perhaps I should have been
afraid, but I was smiling. Look at me now, Sean O'Toole, you
old bastard! Talk about rollin' high! You ever see a game like
this?

All right, so deep down inside, I was scared out of my mind,
but I was just too high to feel it. Breck would never understand,
but Sean would. I had the fever.

I couldn't wait to ante up.